AWS delivers a – rather late – major release of its homebrew Linux distribution Amazon Web Services (AWS) has delivered a major release of its home-spun Linux distribution – albeit rather later than it first promised. Amazon Linux debuted in 2010 and was promoted as optimized for AWS’s infrastructure. Seven years later, the cloud colossus delivered Amazon Linux 2. A successor dubbed AL 2022 was announced …
This feels like they've given the job to a team of two, perhaps three people. You'd be mad to buy it, given the total lack of road map and obvious lack of support resources.
Why not simply offer whatever it is that Amazon themselves use?
It'd be cheaper all round, as then they could charge many times over for work they're already doing!
I agree this seems like a low budget operation, they've also missed the obvious opportunity to gain long term users after stable Centos was deep sixed so maybe they still haven't quite decided where they want their distro to sit between the bleeding edge and 5 year LTS option out there.
AWS publishing their internal Linux version isn't going to happen, odds on it'll be an interesting build full of special purpose code they don't want being seen by any competition (let alone used).
In my mind the reason and place to use Amazon Linux is on AWS. It's super quick to deploy an EC2 or EKS worker without having to either roll your own image or trust the integrity of a marketplace offering from a 3rd party.
Out of the box, those EC2s launched from Amazon Linux also have things properly configured for patch updates, SSH integration, etc. A good solid foundation to get to work on actually solving a problem rather than futzing about getting the scaffolding put up before the real work can start.
If you're using AWS Lambda or AppRunner, those are running on Amazon Linux instances under the covers, so it's worth having some experience and understanding the platform there.
But for any use case outside of AWS itself, I agree; there are so many other options which are better suited.
> Why not simply offer whatever it is that Amazon themselves use?
I work for Amazon. Amazon Linux *is* what we use internally for headless stuff.
We have a tenet at Amazon - we eat our own dog food - meaning that we use the products that we build for our customers.
We rarely have seperate products for internal vs external.
See: https://distrowatch.com/
.......umpty ump distributions.....
.......with umpty ump desktops.......
.......and huge arguments in the community about desktops, about systemd, about wayland, about flavours of GTK......
Why can't we get to a choice list maybe five long?
My choice list is ONE LONG: Fedora37, XFCE, X, GTK3..................................................
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