Exceeded max wait time for ImageAvailable waiter

[a-jackson]

Overview of the Issue

Since upgrading to 1.8.0, waiting for AMI to become ready times out too early. We have AWS_MAX_ATTEMPTS=240 so I would expect 60 minutes. I have seen as short as 7 minutes.

This step regularly takes up to 30 minutes so every image build is timing out and failing. Downgrading to 1.7.1 and the issue is no longer present, Waiting for AMI to become ready took around 27 minutes.

Reproduction Steps

This is happening on every single one of our images when using v1.8.0 so I'm not sure what the minimal reproduction would be. We have Windows Server 2022 and Amazon Linux images.

Plugin and Packer version

Packer v1.14.3
Plugin v1.8.0

Simplified Packer Buildfile

n/a

Operating system and Environment details

Running in Github Actions on standard runner Ubuntu 24.04.3
Image release

Log Fragments and crash.log files

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 11:30:11 GMT ==> ops-win-2022.amazon-ebs.ops: Waiting for AMI to become ready...
Tue, 16 Dec 2025 11:37:56 GMT ==> ops-win-2022.amazon-ebs.ops: Error waiting for AMI: exceeded max wait time for ImageAvailable waiter

[kp2099]

Hi @a-jackson are you setting the AWS_POLL_DELAY_SECONDS value along with AWS_MAX_ATTEMPTS ?

[a-jackson]

@kp2099 Doesn't look like we are. It was working before with the 15s default and 240 attempts for 1 hour total. Will test it again setting both