Big news for those of us who like to go off-piste with our cloud hosted machines: until now “value” cloud provider Digital Ocean only allowed machines to be created from their curated set of OS images (although with some trickery and effort you could bypass this restriction). That’s changed with today’s announcement that they now allow user-supplied images (BYOI?). There is one catch though : images must be (or at least, look like) a Linux OS capable of reading ext3/4 filesystems. So no booting up Windows NT4 or DOS just yet. This facility will however be useful for migrating running VMs from other hosts and for bare metal machine migration, as well as the typical use cases: custom instance provisioning behavior; custom kernel use; and package pre-installation.