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IT Linux

Amazon Linux 2023 Virtual Machine Images Still MIA (theregister.com) 24

When Amazon Linux 2023 was released on March 15, it was supposed to be offered as a virtual machine image that organizations could run on their own servers. From a report: "When Amazon Linux 2023 becomes generally available, it will be provided as a virtual machine image for on-premises use, enabling you to easily develop, test, and certify applications from a local development environment," the web titan's FAQs stated at the time. "This option is not available during the preview." But that commitment has since vanished from the FAQ: it's not there right now nor in this capture of the page on June 2. And it's not clear whether Amazon intends to enable on-premises usage of its Linux distribution.

Those who use Linux in their businesses have been asking Amazon to clarify the situation for eighteen months, starting with a GitHub Issues feature request opened on March 15, 2022, and a similar inquiry posted a year later. In late June, Rotan Hanrahan, a technology consultant based in Dublin, Ireland, chided Amazon for failing to explain what's going on. "I see no evidence of any outreach to the community to explain this, nor any requests for technical assistance (assuming the issue is technical)," he wrote. "If the issue is bureaucratic in nature, we might never see the promised VM image. Some clarification from Amazon is overdue."

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Amazon Linux 2023 Virtual Machine Images Still MIA

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  • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Monday August 28, 2023 @05:28PM (#63804480)

    Least exciting 4th installment in the Chuck Norris series [wikipedia.org].

    -- Missing in Action
    -- Missing in Action 2: The Beginning
    -- Braddock: Missing in Action III
    -- Amazon Linux 2023 Virtual Machine Images Still MIA

    [ Not sure if even a reboot could save this one. :-) ]

  • I inherited one of these from a few years ago as the foundation of an EC2 instance, and dealt with tons of outdated packages, and lots of other problems. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it would be much, much easier to reinstall and reconfigure my application inside Ubuntu, so that's what we did. What's the rational for using Amazon Linux, as opposed to a well support distro? I imagine if I needed a super optimized kernel as part of a container deployment system, this might make sense. But as an
    • Yep. For 99.9% of customers, there is literally no reason not to pick one of the very-well-supporter mainstream distros in 2023.
    • What's the rational for using Amazon Linux, as opposed to a well support distro?

      As clearly explained in the excerpt from the FAQ, it's to allow developers to develop their software on a local machine (without incurring hourly charges from Amazon.

      And I suspect Amazon Linux 2023 is fairly up-to-date, the fact that someone left the image in its original state for years is the result of the admin(s) you inherited the image from not updating it - it's not Amazon's fault than an old distro was out-of-date.

      • Sure, but why use the Amazon Linux on Amazon's infrastructure? We use Ubuntu on Amazon's infrastructure, and Ubuntu locally, to avoid incurring hourly charges from Amazon. Amazon's fault is that it was impossible to update the image. Even after EOL, we've had good luck updating Ubuntu images in-place (after installing new SSL certificates, manually, or upgrading SSL if it's REALLY been a while.) I do not believe that Amazon will be able to create as smooth of a package management system, and upgrade path,
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Amazon Linux is basically a RHEL optimized for their cloud infrastructure with optimizations that will save the end user costs when scaling. For a single server it doesn’t really matter, for thousands of instances, it may.

      RHEL, like Debian, isn’t exactly known for having bleeding edge package versions available, they are secure, tested, stable and predictable which make it well documented and supported, again, something many companies will prefer over the latest features.

      • by kriston ( 7886 )

        Amazon Linux is basically a RHEL optimized for their cloud infrastructure

        No. It's "inspired" by Fedora and has had nothing to do with RHEL or CentOS.

        • by guruevi ( 827432 )

          While Amazon Linux 2 was based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, Amazon Linux 2023 will be based on CentOS Stream which both Fedora and CentOS Stream are the upstream distros of RHEL, most people still think of Fedora as the unstable or "sid" equivalent of Debian and CentOS Stream is "next-stable" or testing (think Ubuntu non-LTS) while RHEL is stable or currently Debian Bookworm.

    • by Wolfrider ( 856 )

      Similar. I ran into an Amazon Linux-based instance last year that just would not upgrade properly, so we re-based it on RHEL. Problem solved.

      Would not recommend AL for long-term instances.

  • Isn't this delay after IBM went all GPL-violaty, threatening Amazon's CentOS downstream?

    There's a big consortium working on a new EL platform that IBM may use but won't have a say in (they'll do neither).

    Too much RPM traction for now for everybody to just jump to Debian but the Ghost of Redhat has gotten to Poltergeisty.

    Some dude in Luxembourg is putting his money where his mouth is to make this happen.

  • From their FAQ:
    Major releases of Amazon Linux will be based in part on the current version of the upstream Fedora Linux distribution, though Amazon may choose to add or replace specific packages from other non-Fedora upstreams (e.g. Linux kernel is sourced from kernel.orgâ(TM)s Long Term Support choices and is maintained specifically for Amazonâ(TM)s Linux products).
    • AWS2023 is specifically Fedora 34, 35 and 36. It's incompatible with EPEL. I don't understand how they will keep it supported for five years given that it is already unsupported upstream ...

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