
Introducing Amazon Linux 2 - hgontijo
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/12/introducing-amazon-linux-2/
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jnsaff2
Q. 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 install additional software packages through Extras mechanism without impacting the underlying LTS stability of the operating system.  
    

[https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-2/faqs/](https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-
linux-2/faqs/)

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unwind
Meta: Please don't indent to block quote. It is for code, and due to HN's
design makes it unreadable on mobile.

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reustle
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.

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Hackosaurus
We are using Amazon Linux in my company, because it is part of the RPM based
distributions that are "security approved" (we needed a recent officially
built kernel). I always felt it was a weird monster, that works really well
for containers, or applications that don't rely on lots of system libraries.
You could quickly end up pulling some packages from both EPEL 6 and 7 (if you
want clang for example)

I hope we can use the entire EPEL7 with this new version.

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sd6594
systemd support is a quite big news, I guess they're now based on Centos 7.

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microcolonel
> _I guess they 're now based on Centos 7_

If the quoted package versions are anything to go by, that is not the case.

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jlgaddis
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.

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make3
as an AWS noob, why would anyone use this over Centos or Ubuntu?

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dagw
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.

~~~
slgeorge
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.

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geofft
AWS is mostly Xen (they _just_ introduced a KVM option
[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-compute-
inten...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-compute-
intensive-c5-instances-for-amazon-ec2/) ), and there are a few things like
"enhanced networking" where you get a performance boost if you're on a kernel
with support but it's still functional if you're on any other kernel.

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rambojazz
What about the licensing terms of this OS, and the eventual blobs that can
possibly come with it?

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mvanbaak
"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.

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lykr0n
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.

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cheald
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.

~~~
geofft
The nice thing about systemd is that it works the same across various Linux
distros (unlike even sysvinit!). So I've been solving this problem by pushing
everyone to upgrade to a version that supports systemd. :-)

I would really like to see something UI-compatible with systemd that works on
non-Linux, though.

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scrollaway
Is this going to trickle down to Lambda? If so what's the implication there,
anything interesting?

