Amazon Web Services
aws.amazon.com › products › compute › amazon linux 2
Security-Focused, High-Performance Linux Environment – Amazon Linux 2 – AWS
3 weeks ago - Run all your cloud and enterprise applications in a security-focused and high-performance Linux environment. ... Amazon Linux 2 is upcoming end-of-support on June 30, 2026.
Amazon Web Services
aws.amazon.com › compute › amazon linux 2 › faqs
Amazon Linux 2 FAQs
3 weeks ago - AL2023 is the latest version of Amazon Linux which offers enhanced security features including FIPS certification, modern package versions, improved performance, and support until June 2029. For best practices on AL2023 Migration, refer here. ... Amazon Linux 2 supports the latest Amazon Elastic ...
When AWS says that the Amazon Linux kernel is optimized for EC2, they're not kidding
I would not expect such a big difference across two different flavors of linux. It would be interesting to see other variables here - which version of imagemagick is being used, do they all have the same compilation flags and how do other cpu heavy tasks differ across distributions. More on reddit.com
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December 26, 2021Have you ever noticed a change in performence when choosing between CentOS, RedHat or Fadora?
Last but not least, Graviton processors ... price performance over x86_64 architecture processors. ... The choice between Amazon Linux, CentOS, and Debian for deploying servers on EC2 depends on various factors such as your familiarity with the operating system, the specific requirements of your application, community support, package availability, and maintenance preferences. Each operating system has its own strengths and considerations · Amazon Linux: https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-2/?nc1=h_ls... More on repost.aws
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March 20, 2024Path of Exile 2
Path of Exile 2 is a next generation Action RPG created by Grinding Gear Games. Set years after the original Path of Exile, you will return to the dark world of Wraeclast and seek to end the corruption that is spreading. Path of Exile 2 is a free-to-play online multiplayer game with co-op for ... More on reddit.com
Amazon Linux 2022/2023
Just my musings from having built most these major OS with packer pipelines in the past, I have no affiliation to AWS or special knowledge. AL2022 was the successor to AL2 and had been under dev/testing for years. They just renamed it from AL2022 --> AL2023 a week or so ago. https://github.com/amazonlinux/amazon-linux-2023/pull/275 . I think they originally planned to GA in 2022, hence the name, and that slid out. putting out an OS is hard work. AL (1) was based off RHEL6 (red hat) AL2 was based off RHEL7 AL2023 is fedora based, so moving to more of a rolling release AL in general is derived off another OS and those OS end of life so Amazon shifts to something new which makes sense for supporting packages and such. So the way these fit in is the same as any new OS, RHEL or Ubuntu new releases. Even Windows server releases; 2012-->16-->19 etc. Traditionally, major OS revolve around a major kernel update as well which often made for breaking changes for COTs apps a client may be using. Support for AL and AL2 got extended out past initial EOL for sec updates, just guessing covid and/or getting AL2023 out the door all played in to those decisions. There hasn't in the past been a supported direct upgrade path from major AL releases, so you can't run an upgrade check and do some commands to update and existing server from AL-->AL2. Ive seen folks do that with RHEL. I've personally never been a fan in the past of in-place OS upgrades for linux or windows; so a rebuild by hand or the opportunity to put everything into Ansible or other conf was a fun adventure. More on reddit.com
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March 5, 2023Optimized performance
Amazon Linux 2 includes support for the latest Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance capabilities and is tuned for enhanced performance. It includes packages that help ease integration with other AWS services.
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.com › products › compute › amazon linux 2
Security-Focused, High-Performance Linux Environment – Amazon ...
Enhanced developer productivity
Amazon Linux 2 is offered as a virtual machine and container image for on-premises development and testing. Developers can speed up their application development by building, testing, and integrating on the same Linux distribution that is used in their production environment.
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.com › products › compute › amazon linux 2
Security-Focused, High-Performance Linux Environment – Amazon ...
Peace of mind with long-term support
Amazon Linux 2 offers long-term support. Developers, IT administrators, and ISVs get the predictability and stability of a long-term support (LTS) release, but without compromising access to the latest versions of popular software packages.
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.com › products › compute › amazon linux 2
Security-Focused, High-Performance Linux Environment – Amazon ...
Videos
AWS
docs.aws.amazon.com › amazon linux › user guide › comparing al2 and al2023
Comparing AL2 and AL2023 - Amazon Linux 2023
1 month ago - Learn about key differences between AL2 and AL2023. Find out about lifespan and support, consistency with deterministic upgrades through versioned repositories, and new core packages.
Phoronix
phoronix.com › review › amazon-linux-2023
Amazon Linux 2023 Is Running Well, Boosting EC2 Performance Over Amazon Linux 2 - Phoronix
March 17, 2023 - With Amazon Linux 2023 it's now running the fresh Linux 6.1 LTS kernel, GCC 11.3 as its default system compiler, Python 3.9, and a variety of other more recent package versions than what is shipped by Amazon Linux 2. For getting an idea that moving to Amazon Linux 2023 has on AWS EC2 performance, I ran some benchmarks this week using a Graviton3-based c7g.metal instance.
OpenBenchmarking
openbenchmarking.org › s › Amazon Linux 2
Amazon Linux 2 Benchmarks, Linux Performance - OpenBenchmarking.org
Amazon Linux 2 benchmarks, Amazon Linux 2 performance data from OpenBenchmarking.org and the Phoronix Test Suite.
Amazon Web Services
docs.aws.amazon.com › amazon ec2 › user guide › networking in amazon ec2 › enhanced networking on amazon ec2 instances › improve network latency for linux based ec2 instances
Improve network latency for Linux based EC2 instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
To reduce the processor reaction latency, you can limit deeper C-states. For more information, see High performance and low latency by limiting deeper C-states in the Amazon Linux 2 User Guide.
Amazon Web Services
aws.amazon.com › compute › amazon linux 2 › features
Amazon Linux 2 Features
April 29, 2026 - Amazon Linux 2 includes newer version of compiler and build toolchain and LTS Kernel tuned for enhanced performance on Amazon EC2.
G2
g2.com › products › tj-cloud-nexus-365-technology-co-ltd-amazon-linux-2 › reviews
Amazon Linux 2 Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2
Users consistently praise the seamless integration with AWS services, highlighting its optimized performance for cloud-native workloads. The lightweight and secure nature of Amazon Linux 2 makes it a reliable choice for running applications on EC2.
G2
g2.com › products › amazon-linux-2-2021-10-12 › reviews
Amazon Linux 2 Pros and Cons | User Likes & Dislikes
It’s easy to maintain, gets regular updates, and just works without unnecessary · Users highlight the optimized performance of Amazon Linux 2, enjoying faster deployments and easier management in AWS environments.
AWS Marketplace
aws.amazon.com › marketplace › pp › prodview-zc4x2k7vt6rpu
AWS Marketplace: Amazon Linux 2 AMI (HVM), SSD Volume Type (64-bit x86) Operating System
Amazon Linux 2 is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It is designed to provide a stable, secure, and high performance execution environment for applications running on Amazon EC2.
AWS
docs.aws.amazon.com › amazon linux › user guide › what is amazon linux 2023? › performance and operational optimizations
Performance and operational optimizations - Amazon Linux 2023
May 22, 2026 - Learn about features of kernel 6.1, toolchain and package selections, and deployment in the cloud.
AWS Marketplace
aws.amazon.com › marketplace › pp › prodview-4us4yprgzaxks
AWS Marketplace: Amazon Linux 2 AMI (amazon linux 2) | Support by SupportedImages
This product has charges associated with it for seller support. The Amazon Linux 2 AMI is a stable, secure, and high-performance Linux environment optimized for the AWS Cloud. With long-term support and regular maintenance, this Amazon Linux 2 AMI provides the latest features for enterprise-level ...
Reddit
reddit.com › r/aws › when aws says that the amazon linux kernel is optimized for ec2, they're not kidding
r/aws on Reddit: When AWS says that the Amazon Linux kernel is optimized for EC2, they're not kidding
December 26, 2021 -
Just thought I'd share an interesting result from something I'm working on right now.
Task: Run ImageMagick in parallel (restrict each instance of ImageMagick to one thread and run many of them at once) to do a set of transformations (resizing, watermarking, compression quality adjustment, etc) for online publishing on large (20k - 60k per task) quantities of jpeg files.
This is a very CPU-bound process.
After porting the Windows orchestration program that does this to run on Linux, I did some speed testing on c5ad.16xlarge EC2 instances with 64 processing threads and a representative input set (with I/O to a local NVME SSD).
Speed on Windows Server 2019: ~70,000 images per hour
Speed on Ubuntu 20.04: ~30,000 images per hour
Speed on Amazon Linux 2: ~180,000 images per hour
I'm not a Linux kernel guy and I have no idea exactly what AWS has done here (it must have something to do with thread context switching) but, holy crap.
Of course, this all comes with a bunch of pains in the ass due to Amazon Linux not having the same package availability, having to build things from source by hand, etc. Ubuntu's generally a lot easier to get workloads up and running on. But for this project, clearly, that extra setup work is worth it.
Much later edit: I never got around to properly testing all of the isolated components that could've affected this, but as per discussion in the thread, it seems clear that the actual source of the huge difference was different ImageMagick builds with different options in the distro packages. Pure CPU speed differences for parallel processing tests on the same hardware (tested using threads running https://gmplib.org/pi-with-gmp) were observable with Ubuntu vs Amazon Linux when I tested, but Amazon Linux was only ~4% faster.
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I would not expect such a big difference across two different flavors of linux. It would be interesting to see other variables here - which version of imagemagick is being used, do they all have the same compilation flags and how do other cpu heavy tasks differ across distributions.
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Did you build ImageMagick from source, or install via a package manager? ImageMagick's build flags can have a very large impact on performance. For example --with-quantum-depth 8 can (in certain circumstances) run at twice the speed of --with-quantum-depth 16. Quantum Depth goes up to 32, which is even slower. Another big factor is whether ImageMagick is built with OpenMP support. There's no guarantee that releases on different package managers will be built with the same options. Unless you build from source, this comparison is not very meaningful.
Dedoimedo
dedoimedo.com › computers › amazon-linux-2.html
Amazon Linux 2 - Who nicked my cheese?
It will be in 5-6 years, by which time, those testing and trialing the Amazon Linux will be comfortable with the technology. The second joker could be performance - if Amazon can optimize their Linux and squeeze more juice from the processor than what RHEL (or others) can do, then they might sway performance-itchy customers, or those with large environments where every cent or percentage of speed difference means a lot to the bottom line.
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Performance between different OSs can be difficult to quantify and will depend on the workload, and the applications that the OS supports
In general, newer kernel versions have better support for latest CPUs. 6.0 has performance improvements over earlier versions
AL2023 comes with Linux kernel 6.1. As it is designed to run primarily on AWS, AL2023 has Performance and operational optimizations
Last but not least, Graviton processors can have better price performance over x86_64 architecture processors.
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The choice between Amazon Linux, CentOS, and Debian for deploying servers on EC2 depends on various factors such as your familiarity with the operating system, the specific requirements of your application, community support, package availability, and maintenance preferences. Each operating system has its own strengths and considerations
Amazon Linux: https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-2/?nc1=h_ls&amazon-linux-whats-new.sort-by=item.additionalFields.postDateTime&amazon-linux-whats-new.sort-order=desc
Developed by Amazon Web Services and optimized for use on AWS EC2 instances.
It comes pre-configured with AWS-specific tools and repositories, making it easy to integrate with other AWS services.It receives regular updates and patches directly from AWS.Great choice if you prioritize tight integration with AWS services and want a stable, well-supported operating system.
CentOS:
A community-driven, open-source distribution derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Known for its stability, reliability, and long-term support cycles.
Debian:
A popular, community-driven Linux distribution known for its stability, security, and adherence to free and open-source principles.
Marty Sweet
martysweet.co.uk › ec2-launch-times
EC2 Launch Times - Marty Sweet
October 30, 2023 - The data shows that Amazon Linux 2023, and Amazon Linux 2, both general-purpose operating systems, boot in largely comparable times from a stopped state. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS boots slightly slower at 14.28 seconds.
Amazon Web Services
aws.amazon.com › home › compute › linux
Amazon Linux 2023
3 weeks ago - Amazon Linux 2023 provides a security-focused, stable, high-performance operating system to develop and run cloud applications.
Ntegral
ntegral.com › home › insights › amazon linux 2023 vs. amazon linux 2
Amazon Linux 2023 vs. 2: Which is Right for You? | Ntegral
October 28, 2024 - The latest version is designed to work seamlessly with containerized applications, offering better performance when deploying microservices. This is particularly beneficial for organizations adopting DevOps practices, as it allows for rapid ...