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AWS Releases Amazon Linux Container Image For Use in On-Premises Data Centers (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the linux-container dept.

Amazon Web Services, a division of Amazon that offers cloud computing and storage services, has released a container image of its Amazon Linux operating system -- which has, until now, only been accessible on AWS virtual machine instances -- that customers can now deploy on their own servers. From a report on VentureBeat: Of course, other Linux distributions are available for use in companies' on-premises data centers -- CentOS, CoreOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Canonical's Ubuntu, and so on. Now companies that are used to Amazon Linux in the cloud can work with it on-premises, too. It's available from AWS' EC2 Container Registry. Amazon Linux is not currently available for instant deployment on other public clouds, whether Oracle's, Google's, Microsoft's, or IBM's. "It is built from the same source code and packages as the AMI and will give you a smooth path to container adoption," AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post. "You can use it as-is or as the basis for your own images."

7 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Why this over CentOS? by tepples · · Score: 2

    In my limited experience with Amazon Linux on an EC2 VPS at work, it has felt essentially the same as any other RPM distribution. What's the big difference between this and CentOS?

    1. Re:Why this over CentOS? by fsagx · · Score: 2

      More ideal to develop and test locally on the same image if you're using one of these in production, though you can make a centos VM on your own that gets you really close to a standard AMI.

    2. Re:Why this over CentOS? by Powys · · Score: 2

      Besides the question of vendor lockin (a big problem for sure), AmazonLinux is indeed based on Centos, but differs in a few ways, the biggest being that it is a rolling release distro, as opposed to versioned distro (like centos 6, centos 7, etc). AmazonLinux also has a different package source for YUM/RPM with different package versions than Centos has (partly due to the rolling release, partly due to trying to appease the masses and offer more versions of more things).

    3. Re:Why this over CentOS? by mveloso · · Score: 5, Informative

      It doesn't have systemd and the other fucked up stuff that Centos7+ has. Example: netstat is still there. So are logfiles, so you don't have to use some retarded tool to look at logfiles. ifconfig still works.

      They replaced all those other tools in "modern" linuxes because the older tools were obviously bad, since they were like 5206 years old.

    4. Re:Why this over CentOS? by xanclic · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I feel bad for even replying, but on my CentOS 7 system, I do have netstat and text logs. I don't know who came up with the "systemd only supports binary logs" meme, but it's really getting boring, especially considering that RHEL 7 and CentOS 7 use text logs by default.

    5. Re: Why this over CentOS? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      I use Freebsd and don't seem to have this problem. ZFS and jails are nice too

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
  2. counteroffensive... by Yonsy · · Score: 2

    To simplify. AWS Linux try to be an "stable" rpm distro like CentOS 7, with the latest packages, but more closer to a rolling release model, something that Ubuntu discussed years ago and decided not to go. The problem with this work is that is flawed. Many people in AWS, updates ec2 images for their apps, and deploy their images in prod, and work previously in dev/stage/qa before and from this produce this images. And in Databases, AWS gives you more advantages with RDS, SimpleDB and DynamoDB cloud database services instead of you deploy database in ec2. To me is a way to compete against Canonical because inside AWS-EC2 you are going to find more instances deployed with Ubuntu LTS than with Amazon Linux, you can check this here: http://www.zdnet.com/article/u... http://thecloudmarket.com/stat...