We are happy to announce baseimage-amzn, a docker base image based on Amazon Linux is now available on Docker Hub.

Back in July, when we announced baseimage-amzn, many AWS users and customers asked us if there was a way to use baseimage-amzn from their local docker development environments. Unfortunately we did not have a good answer till yesterday.

Yesterday, Amazon announced Amazon Linux Container Image and made Amazon Linux yum repositories accessible outside of AWS EC2. Public availability of Amazon Linux yum repositories was required to support local docker development workflow.

Under the hood, baseimage-amzn builds on top of Amazon Linux Container Image and provides additional features that we have found to be very helpful when containerizing complex applications. These include —

Support for running multiple processes

Ability to gracefully run complex daemons such as databases, app and web servers

Correct UID/GID mapping between Amazon Linux Docker Host and Container etc.,

You can find detailed documentation of these features on our GitHub repository.

Depending on the type of workload you are trying to containerize, you might not need all the features that we have in baseimage-amzn.

However when you do need a specific feature, it is very likely that baseimage-amzn will be able to provide you with an elegant solution. We adapt and make most Unix features and primitives available in the container environment. This allows for easy migration and adoption of containers.

Getting started

To get started just docker pull lambdalinux/baseimage-amzn:2016.09-000 .

$ docker pull lambdalinux/baseimage-amzn:2016.09-000 2016.09-000: Pulling from lambdalinux/baseimage-amzn 213af751fa6b: Pull complete Digest: sha256:b94a4ed1f7f08f0409246b9b6b3afb55d3c773329874041c0460423efd7a880c Status: Downloaded newer image for lambdalinux/baseimage-amzn:2016.09-000 $ docker run --rm -t -i lambdalinux/baseimage-amzn:2016.09-000 /sbin/my_init -- /bin/bash -l *** Running /etc/rc.local... *** Booting runit daemon... *** Runit started as PID 7 *** Running /bin/bash -l... [ root@116df3cfa097] / # id uid = 0 ( root ) gid = 0 ( root ) groups = 0 ( root ) [ root@116df3cfa097] / # $ docker run --rm -t -i lambdalinux/baseimage-amzn:2016.09-000 /sbin/my_init \ -- /sbin/setuser ll-user /bin/bash -l *** Running /etc/rc.local... *** Booting runit daemon... *** Runit started as PID 7 *** Running /sbin/setuser ll-user /bin/bash -l... [ ll-user@4ced849ba113] / $ id uid = 500 ( ll-user ) gid = 500 ( ll-user ) groups = 500 ( ll-user ) [ ll-user@4ced849ba113] / $

Epilogue

We hope you will enjoy baseimage-amzn. If you need additional help, please reach out to us on Slack or at @lambda_linux on Twitter.

Thank you for using baseimage-amzn.