EC2 - Amazon Linux - stop auto upgrade

Amazon Linux which runs only on EC2 instances implements an auto upgrade function when it first boots. When you have a much older AMI like 2011.09 or 2012.03 it tries to do a yum update with a newer repository like the recently released 2013.09. As you can tell the older the AMI the longer the update will take. When I run Chef and other cloud-init type functions I run into a yum lock issue. What you want to do to "fix" this problem is to add user-data when the EC2 instance starts up. Below is the necessary cloud-init.

#cloud-config
repo_releasever: 2013.03
repo_upgrade: none

• #cloud-config tells us to use this data for yum config.
• repo_releasever tells the AMI to keep yum at 2013.03 instead of the latest which is default
• repo_upgrade tells the AMI to not do security updates on boot