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How difficult (if at all possible) would it be run a copy of Amazon Linux on a private physical server or hypervisor (Virtualbox/KVM) ? (I am thinking something based in a office/home) I realise it essentially RHEL/Centos with more up to date repositories and some minor changes but I can't help but feel many people would it find it useful to be able run their own copy for staging/development either in the office server room or on their desktops/laptops. I have done some searches on google but can't seem to find any mention of anyone trying this.

As a follow on, if it is possible can anyone suggest some sane steps to actually doing it? (Alternatively if this actually a really daft question and i haven't fully thought it through feel fee to pillory away) (or better yet, if you can think of an alternative - fire that off too!)

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  • Do you have a license to do so? Wouldn't you miss the support for it? What do you try to achieve by doing so? What stops you from setting up your own Centos and using the same repositories?
    – mailq
    Aug 20, 2011 at 18:25
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    If it's essentially a repackaged RHEL/CENTOS then it's significantly GPL. So yes, he would have a license to do so. However, any Amazon specific packages may be under a different license. What he achieves is a development environment that exactly matches his intended production environment. A very valuable thing indeed.
    – bahamat
    Aug 20, 2011 at 18:34
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    @bahamat - exactly my reasoning along with a slight element of laziness, i'd rather put some effort into creating a process for cloning Amazon Linux, rather than expend a lot of effort repeatedly to bring CentOS up to the same state.
    – James Butler
    Aug 20, 2011 at 19:00

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You can use the ec2-undbundle tool to download any AMI you control. As you can make an AMI of an instance, this should be no trouble.

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  • Ah-ha, thanks, knew there would be something simplish I had missed, although this will probably lead to another question - what to do with the output of an unbundled AMI (Xen VM image?) - but i'll save that for when I get there
    – James Butler
    Aug 20, 2011 at 18:57
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    As a small addition incase anyone can't find the ec2-unbundle command, you have to download/install the ec2 AMI tools, the normal ec2 tools bundle does NOT contain this command.
    – James Butler
    Aug 27, 2011 at 13:04

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