Vagrant alternative to Amazon Linux

3
votes

My company has decided to migrate our base server images from Ubuntu Server to Amazon Linux. In the past we would spin up an Ubuntu Server LTS box from vagrantbox.es to emulate an instance in our AWS stack, but Amazon only provides an AMI.

According to the Amazon Linux AMI FAQ, updates are custom tailored depending on the EC2 region the AMI is launched in, which might have issues with exporting an AMI to VDI. I've also read that Amazon Linux removes a lot of cruft from RHEL and Fedora to make it a server-optimized distribution.

  1. How can I emulate Amazon Linux in an environment where I might not have a persistent network connection?

  2. Apart from switching to yum, what pitfalls should I expect in running Amazon Linux locally?

  3. Is there some pre-built vagrant box for Amazon Linux that gets around these pitfalls?

1
linuxamazon-web-servicesamazon-ec2vagrantvirtualbox

1 Answers

3
votes

Amazon does not provide an image of its distribution for use on other VM platforms. You may find these blog posts useful though; they provide detailed instructions for building Amazon Linux disk images, and in the last article he provides direct links to images he built for VMWare and VirtualBox.

Amazon Linux is based on CentOS so you could also start there.