Update AMIs to Ubuntu Focal 20.x

Summary

Current GitLab AMIs are based on Ubuntu 18.04 xenial, which is no longer the latest LTS Ubuntu release.

As a customer who deploys GitLab from your AMIs, we are keen to use the latest LTS.

Problem to solve

Ubuntu 18.04 will be out of support in ~30 months. Whilst this is still a fair way off, we are beginning to eradicate it from our infrastructure in favour of more recent releases.

Ubuntu do not backport all security fixes to previous releases.

Intended users

• Cameron (Compliance Manager)
• Sidney (Systems Administrator)
• Alex (Security Operations Engineer)
• Priyanka (Platform Engineer)

User experience goal

As someone deploying GitLab I should be able to easily select an AMI based on the version of Ubuntu which I consider standard in my environment.

Proposal

Publish a 20.04 AMI alongside the existing 18.04 one, tagged in such a way that existing users are unlikely to automatically select it unintentionally.

For example we currently select the image using the following Packer configuration

"source_ami_filter": {
  "filters": {
    "virtualization-type": "hvm"<
    "name": "GitLab EE {{version}}",
    "root-device-type": "ebs"
  },
  "owners": ["782774275127"],
  "most_recent": true
}

Further details

It would be helpful to extend the existing AMI tagging with a dedicated tag for the GitLab version as well as one for the edition (CE vs EE) and also the base OS (e.g. "Ubuntu 18.04").

Permissions and Security

N/A - the existing AMI pipeline should have everything it requires.

Documentation

The AWS installation instructions should be updated to describe how to select the appropriate AMI for your needs: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/aws/

Availability & Testing

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

What is the type of buyer?

Anyone who consumes the existing AMI.

Is this a cross-stage feature?

No

Links / references