{"id":292,"date":"2017-11-10T15:05:04","date_gmt":"2017-11-10T15:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bootstrap-it.com\/blog\/?p=292"},"modified":"2017-11-10T15:11:03","modified_gmt":"2017-11-10T15:11:03","slug":"aws-amis-another-way-to-roll-your-own-linux-distros","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bootstrap-it.com\/blog\/?p=292","title":{"rendered":"AWS AMIs: another way to roll your own Linux distros"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Open source should be a team sport. Since you\u2019re free to download the code and rewrite it to fit your needs, you should also feel free to share your customizations with your closest friends and family. Over the years, Linux, the centerpiece of the open source world, has been spun into hundreds of distributions (or, \u201cdistros\u2019 as they\u2019re more commonly called). Think there\u2019s an underserved niche no one else has addressed? Does your own business need a purpose-built OS environment to fit its unique workflow? Then by all means, customize away.<\/p>\n

Creating your own distro doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019ll have to crack open the kernel and fight your way through arcane system calls and ISAs. You can simply install your own software, reset some environment variables, or just install a couple of customizing scripts and, assuming your name is Linda, you can call it Lindux (but that\u2019s your call).<\/p>\n

Still, no matter how simple your distro turns out, getting it all packaged up into an ISO archive to share with the world can get really complicated, really fast. Don\u2019t believe me? Just search the internet for guides and tools to \u201cbuild your own Linux distro\u201d and note how many there are, how many steps each requires, and also how many of the tools have been abandoned as new upgrades to a base distro render them useless.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not trying to discourage you. If you\u2019ve got the new distro bug and you\u2019re up to the challenge, by all means, dive in and build us a great one using traditional tools. But if all you\u2019re after is a custom-built Linux server image that will run in the AWS cloud, then there\u2019s a much simpler approach.<\/p>\n

As I describe in some detail in my new\u00a0Manning book \u201cLearn Amazon Web Services in a Month of Lunches<\/strong>,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0the basic virtual machine powering many AWS workloads is the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) server instance. EC2 instances come with a nice range of operating systems pre-installed, but the overwhelming majority are running one flavor or another of Linux.<\/p>\n

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Learn Amazon Web Services in a Month of\u00a0Lunches<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So here\u2019s what you can do:<\/p>\n