I find myself referring to Michael Wittig's blog post on Migrating to Amazon Linux 2 quite often. He briefly talks about: long term support SysVinit (the old) vs. systemd (the new) journald and the changes to the log files starting and stopping services the lack of EPEL and Amazon's replacement some agents and services were renamed, potentially breaking scripts ruby, netcat (nc) and cnf-init don't work out of the box there are no NAT and ECS optimized Amazon Linux 2 images. In general, I feel... if you have a relatively short development cycle and you need to set up your website (or whatever) soon, stick with Amazon Linux 1 aka 2018.03.0 and successive patches. if you have the time to experiment, look for solutions and potentially write your own, start using Amazon Linux 2. As u/cr125rider implies elsewhere in this thread, the switch to systemd (and IMHO, journald) is huge and at the very least will require you to retrain your muscle memory and the way you think about approaching problems. I.e., type X instead of Y. We're using both in my shop and quite frankly, I don't see much of a difference (yet) but speaking from experience, I know it's really painful skipping multiple versions when upgrading the OS. If you ever have to apply security patches to an application and those patches are only available for the most recent OS, you're in for a long weekend either upgrading to each version in succession, or rebuilding the whole instance. To recap: immediate need? Use Amazon Linux 1. Just playing around? Use 2.

Hi, I understand you would like to know how long Amazon Linux 1 AMI will be available once the maintenance support ends on December 31, 2023. Please, let me know if my understanding is incorrect. Yes, you are correct that you will be able to launch Amazon Linux AMIs after the maintenance period. As of now, we do not have any official date on exactly when that will end but please be assure that we will update our policy that will allow our customers enough time to make any updates. I would also like to add on that we do recommend that existing Amazon Linux based compute environments to Amazon Linux 2 so that you continue to receive security and other updates and Amazon Linux 2 offers long term support until June 30, 2025. [1] In case you are further interested, to migrate to Amazon Linux 2, you have to launch an instance or create a virtual machine using the current Amazon Linux 2 image and install your applications, plus any required packages. Then you can test your application, and make any changes required for it to run on Amazon Linux 2. [2] There is also preupgrade assistant that makes it easier to migrate to Amazon Linux 2 from Amazon Linux AMI. [3] I hope this helps. If you need further info, let me know in the comments; otherwise I'd appreciate if you mark my answer as "accepted". Kind regards, Rochak from AWS References: ========= [1] Amazon Linux 2 FAQs - https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-2/faqs/ [2] Migrate to Amazon Linux 2 https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-linux-ami-basics.html#amazon-linux-availability [3] Amazon Linux 2 Preupgrade Assistant - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/03/announcing_the_amazon_linux_2_preupgrade_assistant/