Rusty Reaper

Hat tip to @weideng1 for the image above

Introduction

In my day job we use (and maintain) a Jenkins instance with custom AWS runners. We use this Jenkins instance to test the various Apache Cassandra drivers (as well as a few other related programs) we maintain. The drivers are written in various languages so each of our runners attempts to support testing in a way that's native to the language in question. On occasion we have to tweak these runners in some way and when that happens it's useful to be able to perform the following operations:

• Get a list of the current AWS images for a given language and/or platform
• Delete older AWS images which are no longer used by Jenkins

Rusty Reaper is an attempt to support these operations. It also represents something larger than a trivial problem space for me to monkey around with Rust.

Building

cargo build --release should do it. The generated binary should be called rr.

Usage

Once you have rr built you can use it to get a list of all images for a given language and/or base platform. For example, to find all the older Java runners based on Ubuntu Bionic you could do the following:

$ ./target/release/rr list --lang java --platform bionic
name                             image_id                creation_date              snapshots                                              
java-driver-bionic-64-00000000   ami-00000000000000000   2024-09-27T10:40:15.000Z   snap-00000000000000000 (volume: vol-00000000000000000)
java-driver-bionic-64-00000001   ami-00000000000000001   2024-09-10T14:46:17.000Z   snap-00000000000000001 (volume: vol-00000000000000001)
java-driver-bionic-64-00000002   ami-00000000000000002   2025-04-01T17:13:13.000Z   snap-00000000000000002 (volume: vol-00000000000000002) 

We note that none of these images are in use anymore and that a couple of these are quite old. Let's be responsible and clean up after ourselves by deleting the oldest image:

$ ./target/release/rr delete -i ami-00000000000000001
Result of image deletion: true 

We can now re-run our original query and confirm that somebody is missing:

$ ./target/release/rr list --lang java --platform bionic
name                             image_id                creation_date              snapshots                                              
java-driver-bionic-64-00000000   ami-00000000000000000   2024-09-27T10:40:15.000Z   snap-00000000000000000 (volume: vol-00000000000000000)
java-driver-bionic-64-00000002   ami-00000000000000002   2025-04-01T17:13:13.000Z   snap-00000000000000002 (volume: vol-00000000000000002) 

We can also cross-check our results via the AWS CLI (or your own preferred method)