Amazon Linux container image now available for on-premise data centres

Amazon has released the Amazon Linux container image for on-premise data centres. This new release enables Amazon Web Services (AWS) clients to deploy the same customised Linux experience on their own servers, which previously were limited to virtual machine instances by the e-commerce giant.

In addition to its on-premise presence, the Amazon Linux image can be deployed on the cloud. It is available through the EC2 Container Registry and built using the same code and packages that were initially available within the Amazon Linux AMI, which offers a ‘stable, secure and high-performance’ execution environment on AWS.

“Many of our customers have asked us to make this Linux image available for use on-premises, often as part of their development and testing workloads,” AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post.

The Amazon Linux image is not the only open source distribution available for AWS data centres. CentOS, CoreOS and even Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Canonical’s Ubuntu are compatible with the onpremise data centres. However, the newest image is designed to use EC2 and limited remote access, with no root login and mandatory SSH key pairs to deliver a security profile.

It also supports container solutions like Docker to enable advanced developments.