i'm a little bit confused here. the available packages are not dependent on yum vs apt. it is the amazon repos that vs debian repos that determine available packages. you can add repos, and use the developers own, which sounds a little risky in some cases, but whatever. i'm not an expert by any stretch, but for basic stuff like installing packages yum and apt seemed pretty much identical to me. finding the correct package was a headscratcher at times because most sources give you debian names. but that's just what it is in the centos world i guess. but you entirely lost me with how this is related to lambda. More on reddit.com

Ideally if it's a production server where you're limiting access, you've built the AMI ahead of time with all the packages and whatnot that you're going to be using, and that AMI gets deployed to production ready to serve traffic. So you wouldn't need any outbound access to access package repositories. More on reddit.com

By default, any instances launched with the AL2023 AMI will require the use of IMDSv2-only The amount of users who are about to be shocked that curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/ no longer works will be numerous. More on reddit.com

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