The Amazon Linux AMI is designed to provide a stable, secure, high performance execution environment for applications running on EC2. With limited remote access (no root login and mandatory SSH key pairs) and a very small number of non-critical packages installed, the AMI has a very respectable security profile.

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.

Today I am happy to announce that we are making the Amazon Linux Container Image available for cloud and on-premises use. The image is available from the EC2 Container Registry (read Pulling an Image to learn how to access it). It is built from the same source code and packages as the AMI and will give you a smooth path to container adoption. You can use it as-is or as the basis for your own images.

In order to test this out, I launched a fresh EC2 instance, installed Docker, and then pulled and ran the new image. Then I installed cowsay and lolcat (and the dependencies) and created the image above.

To learn more about this image, read Amazon Linux Container Image.

You can also use the image with Amazon EC2 Container Service. To learn more, read Using Amazon ECR Images with Amazon ECS.

— Jeff;