Available now: Amazon Linux 2023 (Cloud-Optimized Linux Distro)

This week, Amazon released the newest iteration of its proprietary Linux distro for cloud applications, called Amazon Linux 2023.

Amazon Linux is an OS developed from RHEL that has been tailored for use with Amazon’s online services.

The distro is intended to provide a stable, private, and high-performance platform for operating applications and workloads in the cloud. It is a long-term support option. It includes a variety of tools designed to link and communicate with other AWS services.

The three main advantages of Amazon Linux 2023’s third-generation product are high security, a predictable lifespan, and deterministic upgrades.

Security-wise, According to Amazon, this OS edition has “preconfigured security policies” that adhere to best practices. These may be provided at launch or during operation. The OS comes with a Linux kernel that has been toughened.

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Amazon Linux 2023 receives 5 years of long-term maintenance in terms of lifetime. Every three months, updates (which include security changes, problem corrections, and package improvements) are released. Amazon offers security upgrades “as soon as they are available” in addition to quarterly updates.

Finally, I’ll let Amazon describe deterministic updates:

“Amazon Linux offers you adaptable and reliable versioned repositories, which are guaranteed update mechanisms. You have power over how and when you take in updates thanks to the distribution’s lock-in to a particular edition of the Amazon Linux package store. Unlike Amazon Linux 2, a dnf update program defaults to not updating your loaded packages. (dnf is the successor to yum). This makes it easier to make sure that everyone in your group is using the same software versions.

You can read more about Amazon Linux 2023 on the AWS website. If you’re keen to know what the pros/cons are versus Amazon Linux 2, this Website has a review of the advantages and disadvantages of Amazon Linux 2 if you’re interested.

Acquire Amazon Linux 2023

This piece is more of a news update than a how-to, so I’ll leave that to the good instructions Amazon provides on its website. Amazon Linux 2023 is free to use, and it can be reached via AWS fairly easily.

To use Amazon Linux somewhere else? You certainly can—after all, it’s free, open-source software! Just be aware that some Amazon Linux tools included in the distribution might not work with other cloud services or server configurations.

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