Using my stardock image on Amazon AWS free tier

Amazon's AWS service is great. I love the fact that it provides a free server to develop on and if I ever need more, I can pay for it.

Just one catch: many of the things I enjoy working with are small enough to fit in RAM to run, but not to build. Perl 6 is a great example. See my previous posting on building a "stardock" container for Perl 6. Anyway, that won't build on Amazon's AWS free tier, so what do I do? Well, I can spin up a local VM under a Windows box to do the build, so here's what I do:

docker build --tag=stardock .
docker save -o stardock.img stardock
scp stardock.img <awshost>:.

And then on the target system:

docker load -i stardock.img
docker run -it stardock perl6 -v

Now you have a build of Perl 6 Rakudo Star from the most recent HEAD, but without having to have enough RAM in your free dev environment on Amazon!