Find the current AMI image (i.e. Ubuntu 16.04) in AWS using command line

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If you would like to programatically find the current image of a specific distribution in AWS for your region, with the use of the aws cli, use the following (in this example looking for Ubuntu 16.04).

aws ec2 describe-images \
    --owners 099720109477 \
    --filters "Name=name,Values=ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-xenial-16.04-amd64-server-????????" "Name=state,Values=available" \
    --query "reverse(sort_by(Images, &CreationDate))[:1].ImageId" \
    --output text

Or for 18.04

aws ec2 describe-images \
    --owners 099720109477 \
    --filters "Name=name,Values=ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-bionic-18.04-amd64-server-????????" "Name=state,Values=available" \
    --query "reverse(sort_by(Images, &CreationDate))[:1].ImageId" \
    --output text

This is from the examples in the documentation here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/finding-an-ami.html