Packer: Packer 1.1.3 fails for AWS with 'ResourceNotReady: exceeded wait attempts'

[shantanugadgil]

I have a CentOS Packer build on AWS which works with version 1.1.2 but fails with version 1.1.3

The template used to build the image (Source AMI ID taken from https://wiki.centos.org/Cloud/AWS)

{
    "builders": [
        {
            "access_key": "{{user `aws_access_key`}}",
            "ami_block_device_mappings": [
                {
                    "device_name": "/dev/sdb",
                    "virtual_name": "ephemeral0"
                },
                {
                    "device_name": "/dev/sdc",
                    "virtual_name": "ephemeral1"
                }
            ],
            "ami_description": "CentOS 7 with updates ({{isotime \"2006-01-02-15-04-05\"}})",
            "ami_name":  "centos7-with-updates-{{isotime \"2006-01-02-15-04-05\"}}",
            "ami_regions": [
                "us-west-2"
            ],
            "ami_users": [
                "XXXXXXXXXXXX"
            ],
            "instance_type": "t2.medium",
            "region": "us-east-1",
            "secret_key": "{{user `aws_secret_key`}}",
            "source_ami": "ami-ae7bfdb8",
            "ssh_username": "centos",
            "type": "amazon-ebs"
        }
    ],
    "post-processors": [
        {
            "inline": [
                "date",
                "exit 0"
            ],
            "type": "shell-local"
        }
    ],
    "provisioners": [
        {
            "inline": [
                "sleep 10",
                "sudo yum -y update",
                "sudo yum -y install unzip vim tree",
                "sudo yum remove -y docker docker-common docker-selinux docker-engine",
                "sudo yum install -y yum-utils device-mapper-persistent-data lvm2",
                "sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo",
                "sudo yum install -y docker-ce",
                "sudo systemctl enable docker",
                "sudo yum clean all",
                "sudo rm -rf /var/cache/yum/",
                "exit 0"
            ],
            "type": "shell"
        }
    ],
    "variables": {
        "aws_access_key": "",
        "aws_secret_key": ""
    }
}

_As you can see, I am not doing anything complicated, just a Docker capable CentOS 7 image._

When the build fails using version 1.1.3, it times out with the following error:

==> amazon-ebs: Waiting for instance (i-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) to become ready...
==> amazon-ebs: Error waiting for instance (i-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) to become ready: ResourceNotReady: exceeded wait attempts

• Packer version from packer version
  1.1.2
  1.1.3
• Host platform
  Ubuntu 14.04 (but I don't think that should matter)

If I run the about template using v 1.1.2, it works fine. (I tested with 1.10 and 1.1.1 and those works as well)

Regards,
Shantanu

[shantanugadgil]

Adding ec2:DescribeInstanceStatus has made this work for now, though the startup time is a bit slow.

The details are probably well covered in:
https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/issues/5705
https://github.com/hashicorp/packer/pull/5773

Waiting for v1.1.4 to see if the startup goes down as same as v1.1.2.

Thanks and Regards,
Shantanu

[mwhooker]

Thanks for the ticket. Looks like you found the solution. 1.1.4 will be much faster than 1.1.3.

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