CentOS 8 vs. Amazon Linux 2 | Hacker News Reader

CentOS 8 vs. Amazon Linux 2

computingforgeeks.com

29 pointsfortran7727 comments

This is out of date as of the CentOS Stream announcement (such as the part saying CentOS is "Supported for 10 years with security and maintenance updates, until 2029"). Today, if you are choosing between CentOS 8 and Amazon Linux 2, you are choosing between one soon-to-be EOL OS and one that is focused on stability for several years to come.

Came here to say the same thing.

... which makes Amazon Linux more relevant than ever. There's now OEL and Amazon Linux unless you want to live on the edge with CentOS Stream. (If there are others based on RHEL, I can't think of them. Yes, I'm well aware of Ubuntu and Debian. There's nothing wrong with them, but some folks need RHEL for various reasons.)

That was the point! You can run Amazon Linux in a VM or in an EC2 instance. It's a reasonable replacement for Centos, and very similar.

Can you run it in a VM? Where’s the ISO?

Here's how to do it:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-l...

And there's a Vagrant box for it: https://app.vagrantup.com/gbailey/boxes/amzn2

(There are a few versions of this.)

Here's another version, that pre-dates the official docs (when they announced that Amazon Linux 2 was now possible to install on your own metal, it wasn't exactly well-documented.)

The Amazon docs probably cover the same stuff now.

https://superuser.com/questions/1048091/can-i-install-ec2-am...

CentOS 8 EOL was effectively 2029. It's now 2021. So, yea, it's out of date :)

CentOS 8 was a stable OS mirroring RHEL, CentOS Stream is a bleeding edge OS mirroring Debian Unstable / Arch / similar.

Let's not pretend these are the same thing. CentOS went from something valuable to something we already have many of and, frankly, don't need more of.

(Don't get me wrong, I'm not a CentOS / RHEL user - but I do understand the value proposition that was the original CentOS vision)

(Edit: also don't get me wrong, I'm not disagreeing with you. Just stating in more explicit terms that CentOS as we knew it is gone)

> CentOS Stream is a bleeding edge OS mirroring Debian Unstable

It most accurate so that Stream is Debian Testing, since it will be a minor version ahead. Bleeding edge would be Fedora.

Amazon Linux has an eol of 2023. That's not "years to come."

Sorry, I'm going to nit-pick the nit... 2021, 2022, that's two full years, and June 2023 makes it also half of 2023. That's one and a half years more than Centos 8, and it's more than two full years from the current date.

So, yeah, it is years to come... even if only a bit more than a couple of years, 2.5 years is years.

I'll assume you're not a native English speaker as "years to come" generally means many years (5-10-50+) and not a literal singular pluralization of the word year.

How generous of you. Since we were comparing it to something that has only one year of support to come, I thought it was fair to count any more than that as "years"

Amazon has a historically good record and reputation for supporting things longer rather than axing them early. Look at what they've done with Amazon Linux 1, which was supposed to be EOL this summer: (they made a judgement call that people still needed the support, and extended security updates for at least another year.)

Regardless of the dates that are on paper, I think you're the one that's being pedantic now. What's the last time that Amazon ended support for anything that was in GA? It's absolutely fair to say years to come, when making this comparison.

An important omission here is that Amazon Linux 2 is based on RHEL 7, not RHEL 8. (At least, most of the userland is, they do use newer kernels.) Which means it's competing against CentOS 7, not 8 or Stream.

Curiously, Amazon only supports it till June 30, 2023, a year less than RHEL7/CentOS7. It will be interesting to see what they plan to do for Amazon Linux 3, with the latest CentOS news.

> It will be interesting to see what they plan to do for Amazon Linux 3

Rocky Linux from the CentOS creator looks promising:

https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/rocky_linux/

https://github.com/rocky-linux

See also: Running Amazon Linux 2 as a virtual machine on premises

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-l...

There is almost no reasons to not use Amazon Linux on EC2, it's weidly used at AWS, they optimize it for EC2, etc ...

And you can get support for it*

*assuming that you on the technical support plan on your account.

Amazon Linux 2 is optimized for some things, but it's easily possible to beat it in other areas, such as boot time. It's a kitchen sink, which is great for getting started quickly, and not great for optimizing.

Is centos slimmer? I haven't payed much attention, but I haven't heard it talked about as a particularly slim distro.

No, not particularly. Amazon Linux 2 and other enterprise Linux distributions seem similar in that regard.

How about Lightsail, are there any benefits to use it there?

Lightsail is EC2 so all the benefits are the same. If you poke around your instances you'll see it. It's just that the instances live in Lightsail's EC2 account instead of yours.

If you have significant infrastructure in multiple cloud providers, colocation facilities, etc then it's very possible you want to keep your OS and configuration management systems consistent between all of them.

Amazon linux also comes pre-installed with a number of agents that a significant infrastructure may not want to have running at all times. So between releases you must determine what you want to strip from Amazon linux.

Additionally, if you build your ec2 AMIs in your CI/CD pipeline that becomes more annoying with Amazon Linux than it is for centos/debian which have clear unattended install paths.

Additionally, you may be significantly invested in your distro such that changing at any time takes a lot if effort and Amazon linux's releases are less predictable than other distros so if they go down a problematic direction for you, it could cost you a lot of effort to migrate.

Thinks like the ubuntu ec2-optimized AMIs are also no less optimized for ec2, and honestly Amazon linux's kernel these days is hardly different from any others in terms of performance. They apply a moderate patch set, but it's typically for early support for new instance types or just drivers. For example, some patches for their ARM hardware, or their ENA driver or lustrefs for their fsx product. All of these patches get upstreamed too. On top of their kernel, they have ec2 autotune which is a tiny python project that tunes like 10 sysctl that your config management system can easily handle (and may fight with).

Anyway, I agree that for small projects running in only AWS I think amazon linux is a great choice and potentially the best choice, but at larger shops I'm much less convinced. Although, even at smaller shops I think a lot of people are just more comfortable with ubuntu, there's a guide for just about anything on ubuntu, and pretty much no software that doesn't target ubuntu.

We operate about 10,000 servers in EC2 so I keep up with the Amazon kernel patches and apply the relevant ones to our internal kernel build for CentOS, but don't otherwise really look to the rest of amazon linux much

Any possibility to replace systemd?

Not within the Red Hat ecosystem.

If you're living in Amazon world, systemd is only a secondary problem :-(

... and I say that as an ardent user of Devuan.

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