as an AWS noob, why would anyone use this over Centos or Ubuntu?
If you're running on AWS it's really nice to have everything preconfigured for things like logging to Cloudwatch, and not having to mess around with kernel optimisations.
Introducing Amazon Linux 2
11–20 of 29 posts
Re: Introducing Amazon Linux 2
#12as an AWS noob, why would anyone use this over Centos or Ubuntu?
If you're running on AWS it's really nice to have everything preconfigured for things like logging to Cloudwatch, and not having to mess around with kernel optimisations.
Thanks for your answer.
However, they do have images with other distros also well preconfigured though don't they?
Re: Introducing Amazon Linux 2
#13Q. How is Amazon Linux 2 different from its predecessors? There are four major differences Amazon Linux 2 has from its predecessors: Amazon Linux 2 will offer long-term support. It is available as a VM image for on-premises development and testing. It includes systemd service and systems manager as opposed to System V init system and also includes new version of compiler and build tools. It provides the ability to in…
Meta: Please don't indent to block quote. It is for code, and due to HN's design makes it unreadable on mobile.
Re: Introducing Amazon Linux 2
#14"It includes systemd service and systems manager as opposed to System V init system"
I'm off to rewrite/test/fix all ansible and puppet modules so they support FreeBSD. I had hoped AWS was smart enough to stay sober, but no. Too bad, I liked AWS Linux.
Re: Introducing Amazon Linux 2
#15Q. How is Amazon Linux 2 different from its predecessors? There are four major differences Amazon Linux 2 has from its predecessors: Amazon Linux 2 will offer long-term support. It is available as a VM image for on-premises development and testing. It includes systemd service and systems manager as opposed to System V init system and also includes new version of compiler and build tools. It provides the ability to in…
Meta: Please don't indent to block quote. It is for code, and due to HN's design makes it unreadable on mobile.
Yeah, unfortunately see it done often too. Here's the text:
---
> Amazon Linux 2 will offer long-term support.
> It is available as a VM image for on-premises development and testing.
> It includes systemd service and systems manager as opposed to System V init system and also includes new version of compiler and build tools.
> It provides the ability to install additional software packages through Extras mechanism without impacting the underlying LTS stability of the operating system.
Re: Introducing Amazon Linux 2
#16systemd support is a quite big news, I guess they're now based on Centos 7.
> I guess they're now based on Centos 7 If the quoted package versions are anything to go by, that is not the case.
Is Amazon's "Extras" something different than RHEL/CentOS's "Software Collections"? At first glance, they appear to be basically the same thing to me.
Re: Introducing Amazon Linux 2
#17"It includes systemd service and systems manager as opposed to System V init system" I'm off to rewrite/test/fix all ansible and puppet modules so they support FreeBSD. I had hoped AWS was smart enough to stay sober, but no. Too bad, I liked AWS Linux.
I don't know about you, but I like how systemd can restart my processes if they die. sysvinit is ancient; time to move on.
Re: Introducing Amazon Linux 2
#18"It includes systemd service and systems manager as opposed to System V init system" I'm off to rewrite/test/fix all ansible and puppet modules so they support FreeBSD. I had hoped AWS was smart enough to stay sober, but no. Too bad, I liked AWS Linux.
I don't know about you, but I like how systemd can restart my processes if they die. sysvinit is ancient; time to move on.
I've been managing all my application daemons with supervisord across systems for this reason - it's agnostic as to the underlying init system, can restart crashed daemons, and provides the same kind of "service up/down" functionality as sysv or systemd. Systemd can do quite a lot, but if you have to do any kind of orchestration across nonhomogenous machines, you can't necessarily count on it being in play.
Re: Introducing Amazon Linux 2
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're running on AWS it's really nice to have everything preconfigured for things like logging to Cloudwatch, and not having to mess around with kernel optimisations.
Thanks for your answer. However, they do have images with other distros also well preconfigured though don't they?
Yes they do.
Ubuntu considers AWS/GCP to be certified platforms so the server is fully tested on AWS as a hardware platform and there are specific kernel/toolchain/user-space optimisations done to make it run well [0].
The advantage of one of the existing distributions over Amazon Linux is that they are available and tested across multiple clouds, hardware platforms and range of software.
[0] https://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/public-cloud this page leads to various documentation on images, optimisations etc.
Re: Introducing Amazon Linux 2
#20as an AWS noob, why would anyone use this over Centos or Ubuntu?
In theory, since the kernel is specifically tuned towards running on EC2 virtual machines (by the people who know EC2 virtual machines better than anyone) as opposed to 'generic' hardware, performance might be slightly better. Also, and for many more importantly, it's probably easier to get support from Amazon if you're using their official Linux as opposed to a third party distribution.
Your first point is not true compared to Ubuntu at least [0]. AWS is basically are repackaged version of KVM (the last time I checked), so there's no particular advantage. Ubuntu (and I'm sure Centos/RHEL) provide custom images which have the same optimised code.
[0] I'm pretty sure it's true for CentOS / RHEL, I just don't know for a fact.