AlmaLinux 9 Minimal
by cloudimg
RHEL 9 compatible enterprise Linux with a smaller package set and attack surface.
AlmaLinux is a community driven enterprise Linux distribution produced by the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. This is the Minimal edition.
What makes it minimal. Unlike the RHEL 8 generation, an AlmaLinux 9 cloud image is already lean - it does not ship the multi gigabyte linux-firmware package - so the value here is a smaller package set rather than a dramatic disk saving. Removed are the packages a headless cloud server has no use for: the Cockpit web console (a network facing management surface), the tuned tuning daemon, the sosreport collector, the boot splash, and residual firmware and GeoIP datasets. Each is one fewer service or dataset to keep patched and to account for in a security review, which is why a compliance driven deployment chooses a Minimal image. The on disk footprint drops modestly, from roughly 1.36 GB to 1.20 GB at build time.
What is kept. systemd, NetworkManager, the SSH server, cloud-init, the Azure Linux Agent, dnf, sudo, chrony and dnf-automatic. The build fails closed if any is missing after the trim, and the image is rebooted before capture to prove it still boots and networks.
- Rolled forward to the current AlmaLinux 9.x point release and fully patched at build time
- Unattended security updates armed via dnf-automatic
- SELinux enforcing, at runtime and persisted
- No known credential: root locked, key-only SSH, your key injected by Azure at first boot
- Per-VM SSH host keys and machine-id
- Exactly one externally reachable port: SSH on 22
- Gen2 Hyper-V, 24/7 cloudimg support
The full AlmaLinux repositories are enabled and signature checked, so anything you need installs normally. AlmaLinux is free and open source; no subscription or licence key is required. AlmaLinux is a trademark of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation; cloudimg is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Foundation.
Support: support@cloudimg.co.uk