Amazon Linux AMI is a red hat based distro so things like the package installer or the tools for service manage are different, and another thing you need to consider is the way of bootstraping, amazon instances are more flexible to do some things in cloudformation in the ubuntu way the best form to do it is with cloudinit https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CloudInit, you need to consider the packages too are multiple packages that not are native supported by Amazon Linux.
Answer from Douglas Lopez on Stack OverflowI understand that Amazon Linux AMI comes with a bundle of apps that might be useful for integration with AWS.
Apart from that, is there any reason to choose Amazon Linux over Ubuntu or Debian?
Is Amazon Linux more secure, or faster, lighter, more performant at networking , etc than Ubuntu LTS?
Amazon Linux AMI is a red hat based distro so things like the package installer or the tools for service manage are different, and another thing you need to consider is the way of bootstraping, amazon instances are more flexible to do some things in cloudformation in the ubuntu way the best form to do it is with cloudinit https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CloudInit, you need to consider the packages too are multiple packages that not are native supported by Amazon Linux.
Amazon Linux AMI based on CentOS 6.x, whereas Amazon Linux 2 is CentOS 7.x,
So instead of apt you would use yum,
and instead of /usr/local/bin/composer you'll have to use /usr/bin/composer
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EDIT: Issue was using the instance wizard that shows up right after creating a free tier. The regular wizard did not have the ssh problem.
I created an Ubuntu EC2 instance and couldn't ssh to it, getting "resource temporarily unavailable". Played with firewall and security group settings but no dice.
I then tried an Amazon Linux AMI and ssh worked. Is this home court advantage?
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Amazon Linux 2 is “the official AWS distro” and is in some ways better prepared to run on AWS. For example Amazon Linux 2 comes with all the aws tools and libs preinstalled, on Ubuntu you may have to install some manually - no big deal.
In the end either one will work and if you’re more comfortable with a deb-based distro use Ubuntu.
My experience is that Amazon Linux is poorly documented with little community support. It's never quite clear if it's based on Centos or another distro, so finding how to do things can take time. When you want to do anything it can take a lot longer than Ubuntu, which has a huge number of users and great community support.
The software available in Amazon Linux repos is quite limited, and often out of date. Ubuntu in comparison has a large library and it's relatively up to date. With Amazon Linux I have had to resort to downloading source and building it myself, which is annoying as it means you have to update it occasionally, or add repos that have the software.
When I replace my personal "snow flake" Amazon Linux 1 server I'll be going with Ubuntu LTS. However, if I was doing auto scaling and automated deployments for a company that has an AWS support contract I'd consider Amazon Linux 2 as it's probably better tuned for AWS than other OS's and AWS support is excellent.
I was in a similar situation; fully managed dedicated server, LAMP, CentOS. Then we decided to move to EC2. Also, I had very little systems or linux administration experience. I have almost zero experience with Ubuntu, so I really cannot speak to which is the so-called better OS.
I tried a bunch of pre-built AMI's with minimal OS installs from Rightscale, Alestic, Scalr and Amazon. I ended up building all my own AMI's on top of Amazon Linux, first using version 2010.11.01, now I've migrated all my custom AMI's to Amazon Linux version 2011.03.01.
The decision to go with an Amazon Linux AMI vs the other AMI providers was not an easy one. I played around with and tested different setups for close to a month before I made my final decision. In the end, since I wanted to use CentOS, it basically boiled down to one thing. I figured who better to know what hardware related dependencies needed to be included in the OS than the people who designed, built and maintain EC2. Nothing against Rightscale, Scalr or Alestic.
Six months later, even though I hit a few bumps in the road, Amazon's Linux has been quite stable. Though, I did decide to compile some of the software we use from the source (ie. php 5.3, MySQL 5.5, etc) because I ran into trouble with the pre-built packages Amazon maintained in their package repository.
Amazon Linux is a rolling distro, like Fedora, or Debian Testing (sort of). In my view it is not suitable for any production product whatsoever. I'm surprised more people do not realize this. This means if you launched your Amazon Linux instance, say, 450 days ago and do an update today, you will be pulling updates from an entirely different release. Once a new release is made, you have no buffer time, you immediately start pulling updates from the new release. As you can imagine, this may pull in a cascade of dependencies, and has a tendency to break things. For this reason it is inherently unmanageable. You cannot work something like this into an update policy without it being an absolute mess. Do not use Amazon Linux for anything serious.
Ubuntu LTS is a fine choice, as is Debian Stable or CentOS. All of those give you many years of updates to the same release.
Amazon Linux also has no bug tracking system, users must post questions in the AWS Developer Forums to file a bug against a package! There is no way to search for bugs, either. This should be a showstopping issue for almost everyone.
Amazon Linux makes it very difficult to retrieve source packages, needlessly.
Hello. I am new to AWS and I don't know which AMI should I choose. There seems to be so many of those. I want to host my Java Spring Boot hobby project on the cloud. I think of maybe using Ubuntu since it seems kind of friendly (at least for a noob), but I know that Amazon Linux 2 AMI is popular.
So how do companies and people choose which OS, AMI to use? Would Ubuntu be a good choice?