Alpine Linux 3.24

Why the cloudimg image

The stock Alpine cloud image leaves the provisioned administrator account password locked, and because Alpine's OpenSSH is built without PAM that blocks every login including key based ones, so the machine arrives unreachable. cloudimg fixes that at first boot, installs sudo so the administrator actually has privilege escalation, and proves both on a fresh instance before shipping. Alpine has no unattended upgrades equivalent and no errata feed, so cloudimg pins the 3.24 stable branch and ships a daily patch job with cron genuinely enabled, since on a stock install cron sits in no runlevel and anything placed in the periodic directories never runs. Only Alpine's own main and community repositories are enabled, never edge or testing. No password, no bundled key and no shared SSH host key ships in the image, host keys are regenerated uniquely on every instance, and every deployment comes with a paired deploy guide and 24/7 cloudimg support.