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Comment by linpack21 | Hacker News Reader

As a happy user of AWS Linux 2, it is extremely disappointing that they're no longer providing a drop-in RHEL replacement for EC2. I don't see any mention of things we and many large shops like ours care about - long term support and RHEL compatibility.

We've been very vocal to AWS product managers and solution architects about our needs for an Amazon Linux 3 that is a refresh over AWS Linux 2 (at least 5 years support with RHEL 8 compatibility, free kernel patching w/o reboots, official support from datadog, vmware images). Sad that we haven't been heard. We'll now need to plan to move over 20k instances to Rocky Linux.

I suspect that the move to using Fedora has something to do with changes to the CentOS project that AWS Linux 2 forked. Let's hope the beancounters at IBM doesn't have other plans for Fedora.

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You could pay Red Hat for licenses if it's that important to you. But as far as I can tell Amazon is a major supporter of Rocky Linux so sounds like they heard you and are giving you exactly what you want.

Actually Amazon is just providing them with open source credits, much like they do for every other open source project.

s/major/vocal/

I don’t understand your mindset at all. You’re moving thousands of instances that are likely responsible for millions of dollars over to a community run project that is effectively in the hands of random people? Why don’t you just pay Red Hat for their work?

If it's only thousands of instances that's unlikely to involve enough money for Red Hat to actually provide anything like meaningful support, from what I can tell from talking to RH customers of various sizes - but it is likely to involve enough money that selling it to management as basically a moral license isn't going to work either.

Plus, honestly, per-system licensing plus cloud autoscaling isn't really anybody's idea of a good time.

> Let's hope the beancounters at IBM doesn't have other plans for Fedora.

What do you think they would potentially do? Fedora is the upstream for RHEL, it's integral to it. Part of the reason they dropped support for CentOS was because it didn't serve to benefit RHEL very much.

>I suspect that the move to using Fedora has something to do with changes to the CentOS project that AWS Linux 2 forked. Let's hope the beancounters at IBM doesn't have other plans for Fedora.

It does not, according to Amazon themselves. https://twitter.com/stewartsmith/status/1463594136473202692

Disclosure: I work at Red Hat.

I work at a large bank and we are also sad they didn't release another RHEL compatible distro. We prefer not to pay RH subscription fees and are now looking at both Rocky and Oracle Linux. Can I contact you to share notes on approaching such a migration from AL2?

In addition to RHEL compatibility, AL2 worked well because our existing support plan with AWS covered it. It also came with free kernel 'live' patches unlike others (except Oracle).

I don’t imagine this is really the kind of thing you can get into publicly but I’d love to know more about why a bank of all places doesn’t want to pay for RHEL and just go with the free fork instead.

They may be wiling to pay for RHEL for some critical services, but there are a lot of things where a full RH sub doesn't make sense. Dev/test environments, non-critical services, web applications and applications with high parallelisation. You want to support as few OS variants as possible, so by using RH clones there this way you can have "can't tell by the taste" compatibility across all your systems. Plus it makes it easier hiring people.

Thought? Nobody wants to pay for anything.

"Amazon Linux 2022 includes kernel live patching functionality" [1]

https://aws.amazon.com/linux/amazon-linux-2022/features/

I work at AWS but not in the AL team. I’m curious what parts of AL2022 don’t meet your needs? It’ll have 5 years of support and live kernel patching. Just like AL2 I’m assuming official partner support is coming soon (AL2022 is still in preview release)

It seemed to read pretty clearly to me that "being its own Fedora derivative and therefore not as easy to trust for RHELish workloads as something like Rocky" is the sticking point, though 'mst needs more coffee' is always a possibility here.

Similarly had amazon created their own Debian derivative I'm not sure it'd be that tempting to users whose baseline is Ubuntu.

It's almost like RH/IBM made this change to prevent AWS/Oracle from cloning their OS!

> We'll now need to plan to move over 20k instances to Rocky Linux.

No judgement - curious, what does Rocky give vs. al2022? RPM compatibility? Or maybe, what do you like about RHEL compatibility?

compliance i suspect. If you're working in compliance heavy industries, then RHEL certification is signed off on.

Any other linux (including Rocky Linux) will need to be painfully certified.

That makes sense, but wouldn't you expect al2022 to reach compliance before Rocky?

I just deal with iso cert, so not clear on possible requirements

why would amazon linux be a suitable substitute for genuine RHEL if compliance is an issue?

If compliance is an issue, I doubt whether there is such a thing as a "suitable substitute". Certainly none of the commercial applications I interact with accepted CentOS as an alternative to RHEL, so they certainly won't allow a substitution for Rocky or Alma.

While AL2022 isn't a drop-in RHEL alternative, it seems much more likely that vendors will accept it as a commercially supported install base given that it is a first-class citizen on the biggest cloud.

amazon linux is BETTER than rhel in that regard.

AWS has a secret weapon in compliance - its called AWS Artifact. most compliance certifying agencies will pass-through accept AWS Artifact reports.

No technical reason. Just sheer Amazon muscle i guess.

https://aws.amazon.com/artifact/

We used that for PCI compliance when I was working at Whole Foods. That only covers their part of the shared responsibility model.

There’s still a whole boatload of things that still need to be covered which do not fall on their side of the shared responsibility model.

So this is a weird thing to think, because Amazon Linux 2 was never a drop-in RHEL replacement. It was a bastard child between RHEL 7 and Fedora stuff, combined with a custom kernel. You didn't have RHEL kABI and you didn't even have complete RHEL userspace compatibility either.

If anything, Amazon Linux 2022 clarifies things by indicating they directly track Fedora Linux, branch and stabilize that, and offer their own lifecycle guarantees for that branch.

I'm confused about what data dog has to do with running an operating system and what RHEL 8 compatibility means. Kernel patching is a feature of a good number of free operating systems. As for LTS, I really wish that every company that griped about long term support for an OS would volunteer to pay 2-3 engineers to contribute to OS development. You'd probably see a lot more sustainable OS ecosystem if that happened.

> As a happy user of AWS Linux 2, it is extremely disappointing that they're no longer providing a drop-in RHEL replacement for EC2.

Like RockyLinux ?

I’d go for Alma Linux, but I get your point.

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