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Comment by netsec_burn | Hacker News Reader

This is out of date as of the CentOS Stream announcement (such as the part saying CentOS is "Supported for 10 years with security and maintenance updates, until 2029").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.

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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

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 So, yea, it's out of date :)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.

... 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 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...

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.)

Came here to say the same thing.

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