In a deviation from its earlier policy of not permitting its cloud services users to run operating systems on its clients’ servers, Amazon has since launched its own version of the Linux OS, according to a report in VCCircle. This move by Amazon Web Services is seen as a response to rivals Oracle and Microsoft who have been offering what is known as Hybrid technology to their clients in which the open platform OS Linux can be used by the clients availing cloud services to run many other programs, on their own severs as well as on the cloud.

Up to now, Amazon did not provide this facility to its clients directly. Only the Amazon-owned data centers were permitted to run these OSs.

With the objective of changing this practice Amazon has developed its own version of the operating system called Linux 2, which it will rent out to its cloud computing clients for use on their servers. It will then facilitate the running of many programs that the clients need on it. These include Microsoft’s Hyper-V, VMware, Oracle’s VM VirtualBox, Docker and Amazon Machine Image, which is the alternative to Docker.

The OS Amazon will provide comes with a 5-year support by Amazon, that will cover security patches and troubleshooting on an ongoing basis.

Amazon had already ruffled feathers in the industry when it practically pulled away clients of companies like HP and IBM, which were offering server-side hardware and software, by making these available on its cloud to enterprises that signed up for its cloud services. This is where the rivals brought in the Hybrid technology, wherein the customers had the choice of alternating between their own servers as well as the cloud. The present step by Amazon in association with VMware, is its answer to this threat.