This is a minimal CentOS 7 (x86_64) installation, mainly used as a common base system on top of which other appliances could be built. It contains just enough packages to run within AWS, bring up a SSH Server and allow users to login. Cloud-init, the defacto multi-distribution package that handles early initialization of a cloud instance, as well as the CentOS security updates available at the release date (2018-03-18) are included. Root login is disabled and only the 'centos' user is allowed to connect using ssh public key authentication.