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Amazon Linux 2 is built on CentOS 7.

AWS are a sponsor of Rocky Linux

Don't think this is the case. It's downstream of RHEL but with a bunch of liberties, so CentOS/Rocky doesn't change much there

I guess they’re kinda forced to. Switch to Ubuntu or Debian for Amazon Linux 3 would be weird, but perhaps a smart choice.

They could do their own Fedora downstream, or jump to openSUSE for a different stable RPM distro.

The could just do their own RHEL fork, which would make Amazon Linux a peer to rocky instead of a downstream.

They could have done that from the start, like Oracle, but they choose not to for a reason, most likely to save money.

So now they either have to support Rocky Linux, and hope others do to, or pay the full cost of maintaining a RHEL compatible distro.

Looking at all your comments in this thread and you really don't know what you are talking about. Just spreading FUD.

RHEL7 is the upstream for AL2 and there is a LOT of heavy lifting done by AWS. Newer kernel, newer toolchain, newer glibc. They do live patching. They actually test all sorts of workloads before even a minor errata update. They took OpenSSL 1.0.2 through FIPS validation with NIST.

Just stop talking.

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