What Operating System, AMI should I choose for my hobby project? How do people choose which Linux distribution to use for real company project?
AWS EC2 - what is the difference between Amazon Linux AMIs - Stack Overflow
Amazon Linux vs Ubuntu for EC2
AMI 2022 repo always behind Amazon Linux 2 on patches
Optimized 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.
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.
Large partner network
Amazon Linux 2 has a rapidly growing community of AWS Partners that includes independent software vendors (ISVs). You can install and run many popular partner applications.
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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?
Instead of guessing which version of RHEL a particular distro is based off, just run:
rpm -E %{rhel}
For Amazon Linux 2, this will give you 7.
There's a discussion thread available over on the AWS forums that indicates the officially supported Amazon Linux AMI is not based upon any Linux distribution. Rather, the Amazon Linux AMI is independently maintained image by Amazon.
The first option is your image is a more stripped down/bare bones Linux image while the second includes commonly used packages/tools that are used when creating hosted services (such as AWS command line tools and Ruby).
I have an Amazon Linux 2 AMI (HVM), SSD Volume Type and you can see that extra packages like java and ruby are not installed.

The primary differences between Amazon Linux 2 and Amazon Linux AMI are:
- Amazon Linux 2 offers long-term support until June 30, 2023.
- Amazon Linux 2 is available as virtual machine images for on-premises development and testing.
- Amazon Linux 2 provides the systemd service and systems manager as opposed to System V init system in Amazon Linux AMI.
- Amazon Linux 2 comes with an updated Linux kernel, C library, compiler, and tools.
- Amazon Linux 2 provides the ability to install additional software packages through the extras mechanism.
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