Amazon Web Services is letting customers download its own artisanal Linux.

The company has loosed its Linux Container Image to assist those planning a move into its cloud can test their software and workloads on-premises.

Previously the image was only accessible on-cloud, for customers running virtual machine instances on AWS.

The cloud giant's chief evangelist Jeff Barr made the announcement in this blog post.

Barr notes that the Linux config is designed for security: there's no remote root access; SSH only runs using key pairs, not passwords; and it's built with a very small number of “non-critical packages.

“It is built from the same source code and packages as the [Amazon Machine Image] 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”, Barr notes.

One thing to note: on AWS, Amazon handles the business of updating critical or important security updates at boot; as an on-premises instance, users will have to run their patches.

Customers can pull the image from the EC2 container registry.

Cloud has often been suggested as the ideal test and dev environment, on cost avoidance grounds. AWS says it's made its Linux available after customer requests to do more development on-premises. Those requests don't represent a bursting of the cloud bubble, but it's nonetheless notable that developers feel the need to do some testing without paying for it by the hour. ®