Ansible playbook to find the latest Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (bionic) AMI in AWS.

find-latest-ubuntu-bionic-ami.yml

---
- hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: no
  vars:
    aws_region: "eu-west-2"
  tasks:
  - name: Find Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS AMIs
    ec2_ami_facts:
      region: '{{ aws_region }}'
      owners: 099720109477
      filters:
        name: 'ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-bionic-18.04-amd64-server-*'
    register: ec2_ami_facts_result
  - name: Store the Ubuntu AMI's data
    copy:
      content: '{{ (ec2_ami_facts_result.images|sort(attribute="name",reverse=True))[0]|to_nice_json }}'
      dest: '{{ aws_region }}/latest-ubuntu-bionic-ami.json'
    when: ec2_ami_facts_result.images|length > 0