Amazon Linux Reviews

Amazon Linux is used for hosting back-end applications created in Node.js, databases, and DevOps purposes. Microservices, such as Docker services, are deployed on Amazon Linux.

Amazon Linux is used with EC2, the AWS EC2 service, which is the primary service for deploying back-end services. A microservice architecture is implemented using EC2 instances for deploying particular services in Amazon.

Amazon Linux is also used for RDBMS and SQL databases deployed in Amazon for database purposes.

Amazon S3 bucket is used for storing resumes of candidates because the application is a hiring platform, requiring resume file storage for retrieval and pre-signed URL generation. Whenever resumes need to be stored, an S3 bucket is used. CloudWatch is used to monitor the changes occurring during application deployment in EC2 instances.

Amazon Linux offers multiple services such as EC2, S3 bucket, EKS, and CloudWatch, which are valuable for application requirements.

A specific example of how Amazon Linux has positively impacted the organization involves storing images and resumes with quick and faster retrieval. Although other options were checked, S3 was the quickest option because it provided 99.9% availability and very reliable performance. Resumes are stored in an S3 bucket in the respective file, and pre-signed URLs are fetched and stored in the SQL database tables. Whenever a resume is needed, the S3 URL is used directly to fetch the resume.

Amazon Linux and S3 services, including live trail functionality, provide better visibility of changes being deployed to particular services. When a service is deployed, the ability to check if it is failing and at what point it is failing is crucial. After deployment, live trails can be checked and logs put in the code can be viewed in the live trail. The EC2 instance is very effective because it can be scaled according to application needs. With currently over 10,000 users, scalability becomes important if growth reaches over 1 lakh users. Amazon Linux provides very good scalability.

Amazon Linux could be improved in the user interface part, as it is quite complicated for new users. Compared to Ubuntu or CentOS, Amazon Linux has a smaller community, resulting in fewer available tutorials. Additionally, there is less flexibility outside of AWS services. Amazon Linux is best optimized for AWS but is not ideal for local development or multi-cloud environments.

Amazon Linux has been used for two years throughout my career.

Amazon Linux is quite stable and very reliable for the type of application in use.

Amazon Linux is very scalable. The organization has grown from 10,000 users to 1 lakh users, and the service provided is very reliable and highly scalable.

Customer support is great, though it has not been needed because the service is working quite well and has not required customer support assistance.

Previously, Linux on Amazon or Ubuntu was used, but Ubuntu was not very beginner-friendly and the setup was more difficult. Amazon Linux was chosen due to its advantages over Ubuntu.

Deployment is faster and visibility is achieved very quickly, making it more reliable overall.

Amazon Linux setup is somewhat challenging initially, but once familiarity with the system is gained, it works very well for applications. For full-stack web-based applications or mobile applications, Amazon Linux provides very good support for back-end and front-end deployments and the entire CI/CD process. The service can be utilized directly without extensive preliminary work.

Amazon Linux is deployed independently; since it runs on AWS infrastructure, separate deployment is not necessary as it is publicly available.

Pricing is very good. The setup could be more beginner-friendly, and regarding licensing, there is limited knowledge, but it is free to use. Payment is only required for the EC2 instance and for data transfer or storage. Setup on AWS EC2 is very quick, typically within minutes, making it cost-effective and easy to deploy.

No other options have been searched for or considered except for Amazon Linux.

Amazon Linux and S3 services, including live trail functionality, provide better visibility of changes being deployed to particular services. When a service is deployed, the ability to check if it is failing and at what point it is failing is important. After deployment, live trails can be checked and logs put in the code can be viewed in the live trail. The EC2 instance is very effective because it can be scaled according to application needs. With currently over 10,000 users, scalability becomes significant if growth reaches over 1 lakh users. Amazon Linux is highly scalable and very reliable, making it an excellent choice overall. This review has been rated 9 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We run EC2 instances on Amazon Linux, and we use Amazon Linux-based Docker images as well, which serve as a container for our data science users. On top of Amazon Linux, we have installed all data science-supported software that they use, including Jupyter Notebook and R.

We also run APIs on top of Amazon Linux. We run Fargate containers which are again based on Amazon Linux. We run FastAPI, and then we host our APIs on top of it, allowing our UIs to connect to this API in the backend.

There are multiple use cases for Amazon Linux. The first thing is installing R and R packages. It is not easy because for R to be installed, you need to solve many dependencies. Most of those dependencies are already available in Amazon Linux. Our organization also does a lot of security settings, given that it is a banking domain, and all those settings are straightforward. There is nothing we cannot do on Amazon Linux. It is easily customizable, and there are many packages available that can be installed on it. The very good thing is the AWS support we get; if there are any issues, we can reach out to the support team, and they will troubleshoot and help us, through which we learn and can resolve issues ourselves next time.

It is all about patching for security settings on Amazon Linux. When there is a vulnerability at a given patch level, the patches are readily available, and we can install them on top of what we already have. Regarding the Docker settings, there was a vulnerability recently for which there are already configuration files that we can change to secure it.

Amazon Linux has definitely reduced our costs. If we wanted to run Red Hat, which is very similar to Amazon Linux, we would have to pay more. A lot of products supported on Red Hat are also supported on Amazon Linux, which has been great for us since we were running things on Red Hat in the past both in an on-premise environment and when we migrated to AWS. After Amazon Linux was available, we started using it, and everything is working fine. With respect to efficiency, performance is good; we have not found any performance issues that hinder or impact our applications. Additionally, it gets supported very well on all available AWS services, such as EC2 instances and Fargate, which is very compatible. Given that we are in banking, security is vital for us, and whenever there is a vulnerability, we immediately see patches available to remediate it, which works great for us.

Things are working fine overall; there is not anything I could advise as an improvement for Amazon Linux.

If we had to do customization for RStudio, that would be good. Many data science users from other companies might be using RStudio and R, so if there were an AMI out there that had all these packages and products installed by default, that would be beneficial. However, I am not sure how that would work since we pay for RStudio licensing, and I do not know if that could come by default in Amazon Linux.

I choose nine out of ten because it could use a bit more options. For example, an Amazon Linux Docker image that is pre-built with Jupyter Notebook or RStudio would mean less work for us as customers, enabling us to download and get it installed and running as soon as possible.

I have been using Amazon Linux since 2019.

We evaluated Amazon Linux, and it is very stable. We have been running it since 2019 without complaints.

The scalability of Amazon Linux is very good; we run it on top of scalable EC2 instances, and we do not find any issues there.

Customer support for Amazon Linux is excellent. When we reach out to customer support for any issues, they resolve them promptly. If there is a case pending for a long time, we at least receive an update from support so we know how to proceed.

We were using Red Hat and CentOS, which was open-source. We switched from Red Hat to CentOS because CentOS was more cost-efficient than Red Hat, but after switching to CentOS, we lacked support; patch availability was slow, and we did not have help with any issues. We switched from CentOS to Amazon Linux, and we got a lot of support, and the patch availability is fast.

The product itself is very good; even if I switch organizations and they are not using Amazon Linux, I will share my experience that Amazon Linux has worked great for us in these use cases. I do not see any issues with the product; it is all good. I rate this product nine out of ten.

My main use case for Amazon Linux was running production workloads, primarily using it to host backend services for the company and web applications on EC2 instances while helping DevOps with several tasks, one related to QA, as a QA Analyst and QA Engineer.

I hosted a production REST API backend on EC2 using Amazon Linux which handled user authentication and core transactions for a customer-facing web application, and it scaled reliably using AWS Auto Scaling and load balancing.

Using Amazon Linux delivered ROI in several practical ways, notably eliminating OS licensing costs, saving thousands of dollars per year compared to licensed enterprise Linux options, and reducing operational effort with an estimated 25 to 30% reduction in OS-related operational work due to AWS-native defaults and predictable updates.

Amazon Linux fit very naturally into our automation and security practices, regularly used with infrastructure as code and automated provisioning, which made it easy to spin up consistent environments across development, staging, and production, aligning closely with AWS best practices.

The strongest features of Amazon Linux are its tight AWS integration, security, and long-term stability, with one of the biggest advantages being how well it integrates with AWS services out of the box.

The tight AWS integration of Amazon Linux made my day-to-day operations much simpler and more reliable, as IAM roles work seamlessly at the OS level, eliminating the need to manage static AWS credentials on instances, which improved security and reduced configuration effort when deploying new EC2 instances or scaling automatically.

Another feature I found very useful in Amazon Linux is its predictable and well-curated package ecosystem, with stable and tested repositories for AWS environments reducing dependency issues and making system updates safer in production, along with smooth integration with automation and containerized workloads.

While Amazon Linux worked very well overall for us, there could be a few areas for improvement. For instance, the package ecosystem compared to more community-driven distributions like Ubuntu, where some packages can lag slightly behind in terms of versions, occasionally requiring extra effort when newer language runtimes or tools were needed.

I have been working in my field as a manual tester and then moved into automated testing for seven years in total, performing and executing test cases on some freelance platforms.

Amazon Linux is very stable, especially for long-running production workloads on AWS, having been able to run it on production EC2 instances for extended periods with minimal issues.

Amazon Linux scales very well, especially when used in AWS-native environments, working seamlessly with AWS Auto Scaling and load balancing to scale from a small number of instances to dozens or more during traffic spikes without needing OS-level changes.

Amazon Linux customer support is generally good, understanding that support is structured through AWS support plans and official documentation, relying on AWS for issues directly related to Amazon Linux behavior on EC2, with timely and helpful responses for performance, updates, or AWS integration issues.

Positive

We have not used any other solution before Amazon Linux.

Using Amazon Linux delivered ROI in several practical ways, notably eliminating OS licensing costs, saving thousands of dollars per year compared to licensed enterprise Linux options, and reducing operational effort with an estimated 25 to 30% reduction in OS-related operational work due to AWS-native defaults and predictable updates.

The pricing and licensing model of Amazon Linux is one of its biggest advantages, having no additional licensing cost and no per-core and per-instance OS fees, making cost planning straightforward by only paying for the underlying AWS infrastructure.

Before choosing Amazon Linux, I evaluated a few alternatives, specifically considering Ubuntu Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS.

I would advise that if you are planning to run workloads on AWS, Amazon Linux is a strong and practical choice, best suited for AWS-native, cloud-first architectures where tight integration with AWS services, security, and long-term stability matter. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My main use case for Amazon Linux is deploying our ClickHouse cluster. ClickHouse is an OLAP database where we are spanning data across multiple terabytes, and we're using EC2 instances on AWS, which are based on the Linux operating system. We have a cluster of 16 EC2 instances based on Amazon Linux, and using those instances, we are deploying our ClickHouse cluster.

In addition to deploying our ClickHouse cluster, we are also using Amazon Linux for our ClickHouse Keeper, which is for the coordination, and we are using it for our CHProxy, which is the ClickHouse Proxy for user authentication, query limiting, and other functionality.

Amazon Linux provides us a great capability of deploying ClickHouse, as ClickHouse is much more compatible with Linux instances if you're deploying it on-premises, as the support team has advised us. We have specifically utilized Amazon Linux in our use case to deploy ClickHouse, and since we have configs that we need to manually deploy there, we have to work with Linux commands to change our configs. That sort of capability and ease of doing things is being provided by Linux, so we are very happy with Amazon Linux.

Stability is a great point since we rarely face any downtime with Amazon Linux in terms of Linux instances going down. Regarding security, since we have deployed this in the VPC, we need to ensure we have the right protocols opened, and Linux within itself provides us great capability to ensure we have high-level security as well. Amazon Linux integrates well with services like S3 for storing our data, and we are also using Route 53 for our routing services and DNS services for the ClickHouse cluster. It integrates well with AWS services, and we are also using CloudWatch for the metrics.

Amazon Linux has positively impacted our organization in a couple of ways. There were two ways to deploy a ClickHouse cluster: the first was to go with a cloud solution, and the other one was to go with Amazon Linux. We looked at the cost in both ways, and the cloud version was expensive for us, so we looked at Amazon Linux on-premises and tried to deploy our cluster by doing a certain POC. We found out there was a significant cost difference. It gave us much more control over how we store our data and what we can do with it, so we went with the approach of deploying a cluster on Amazon Linux. That was a positive impact for us in terms of having control over data, keeping it in a secure network of ours only, and it also saved us costs, giving us a full circle moment to save our expenses.

I believe Amazon Linux provides a wide variety of instances in terms of the RAM and storage that you want with the EBS volumes, so nothing can be improved in that regard. It's just that with the start time, when you're initially starting an instance, it takes a certain amount of time to reboot itself and set up the environment, and if that can be improved to instant speed, I think that will be much more helpful.

I gave it an eight because of the instant speed consideration. Since we are working in a real-time manner and need to scale things immediately, the time it takes to boot an instance and then deploy things is preventing me from giving it a perfect rating. That aspect is crucial, as it affects the time required to start up an instance and instantly deploy it.

I have been working in my current field for 4.5 years.

Amazon Linux is stable in my experience, and we did not face any downtime or reliability issues.

In terms of scalability, we find it easy to scale our workloads up or down, with the only drawback being the time it takes to restart or boot an instance. Otherwise, everything else is good.

We have been satisfied with all of this. We had good support from AWS if we faced any issues, and the documentation is really great. We faced no compatibility issues, so I think we are in good standing on that part.

We didn't reach out to customer support because we didn't face any issues, so I would rate the customer support a 10 out of 10.

Positive

Since our whole cloud network is deployed in AWS, we didn't look into other instances. We initially considered using Windows for the instances, but then we switched to Linux since the ClickHouse team informed us that Linux instances would be hugely compatible with the ClickHouse environment.

As a developer, I'm not directly impacted with the cost, but during the meetings I attended, there were discussions of saving up to 30% of cost savings by going with Amazon Linux.

As I mentioned for the cost savings, we saved 30% in terms of the cloud infrastructure. Time saved is significant since we are working with a real-time database, which saves us time compared to going with OLTP. With Amazon Linux coming in, we have also saved time in terms of query execution time, and those are the numbers that I can share.

My advice to others looking into using Amazon Linux is that it's a great piece of technology you can use to deploy your application environment. It works within a great environment of a private network, integrates well with other AWS services, keeps you in a close-knit ecosystem, is highly scalable, and ensures that you have high performance for your application while rarely facing any downtime. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I normally use Amazon Linux for monolithic applications or websites as a web server. Amazon Linux helps me run those monolithic applications or web servers by allowing us to install NGINX or HTTPd using the package managers, RPM. Amazon Linux provides a secure, stable, and high-performance environment that is optimized for the AWS ecosystem itself. It features deep AWS services integration, long-term support, and performance tuning for EC2, making it a reliable choice for monolithic applications.

I normally use Amazon Linux for containerized applications as well, such as EKS. As node groups in EKS, we use Amazon Linux AMIs. Since it is reliable, secure, and gives long-term support from Amazon AWS itself, it serves our needs well.

Considering the best features Amazon Linux offers, I would say the security and reliability stand out. The operating system has been optimized by AWS itself, so it is highly optimized. There are various pre-installed AWS tools inside it. It is Graviton optimized for Arm-based workloads and has security by default with enhanced security, lifecycle, and deterministic updates. Upgrades are also good in this offering. It is cost-effective and works well with the modern toolchain.

Regarding those features, Amazon Linux benefits my day-to-day work by enhancing creativity and content generation with visuals in slides, video productions, and it is quite time-saving.

Regarding how Amazon Linux has impacted my organization positively, it helped us mostly with the costing part. Beyond that, the security posture has improved, which is always a big challenge in larger organizations.

Using Amazon Linux gives us a pay-as-you-go model, paying for fewer resources instead of a large upfront investment in hardware servers. I have seen various case studies which have helped save a lot of costs. Regarding security, I have seen very few incidents related to Amazon Linux. There are various kernel issues which we face in other operating systems, but not in Amazon Linux.

While VM images exist in other virtualization platforms, Amazon Linux is primarily designed for EC2 itself. Expanding official support for on-premise and hybrid scenarios would improve the flexibility for companies with multi-cloud setups. Additionally, expanded package repositories for third-party software would be beneficial. Compared to Ubuntu or Red Hat, Amazon Linux has smaller communities and fewer third-party repositories. Documentation examples could be improved by providing more real-world, varied use case examples rather than just command references.

Amazon Linux should be easily upgradable. From Amazon Linux 2 to Amazon Linux 2023 requires a complete migration, as there is no direct in-place upgrade path. Having an easier upgrade path for migrating from one version to another would be really helpful. Standardized Yum behaviors would also help because Amazon Linux 2023 defaults to DNF, while Amazon Linux 2 was established using Yum workflows. This creates minor compatibility hurdles. Although we can use Yum, it would be better if those behaviors were standardized. Minor improvements could also be made regarding an enhanced terminal experience.

I did not rate Amazon Linux as a perfect ten because of the upgrade path and standardizing the package behaviors. The improvements I needed in Amazon Linux included the upgrade path, standardizing the package behaviors, and support for third-party software. That is why I rated it nine instead of ten.

I have been using Amazon Linux for the past seven years.

In my experience, Amazon Linux is stable. I have not faced any issues with stability.

In my experience, Amazon Linux's scalability is not an issue. I have not faced any issues with that.

The experience with customer support for Amazon Linux was very good. I interacted with them a couple of times and they were very helpful.

Previously, I was on a private cloud setup where we used to use Ubuntu or Red Hat as per the customer requirements. Later on, I switched to Amazon Linux because of its security and compatibility and everything else it offers.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was really good. The cost is comparatively less, and since there is no license involved when we are using it within AWS itself, the setup was also quite simple. Overall, it was a good experience.

I took Amazon Linux from the Marketplace itself.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was really good. The cost is comparatively less, and since there is no license involved when we are using it within AWS itself, the setup was also quite simple. Overall, it was a good experience.

I have not explored any other options because Amazon Linux itself has a lot of options and features which really helped me with my applications deployment and everything else. If I wanted to explore alternatives, I would have considered Ubuntu, which is also similarly very good.

Most of what I would recommend relates to the security, performance, compatibilities, and support of Amazon Linux that I mentioned earlier. My advice is to not perform in-place upgrades. Try to identify the differences that exist between Amazon Linux 2 and 2023 before upgrading. I rated this product nine out of ten overall.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My main use case for Amazon Linux is to run my production environment in a robust, scalable operating system. I have a SaaS platform where we run all our servers in Amazon, and we use Amazon Linux as the operating system that serves all our servers to our customers.

Being a SaaS platform, we need to ensure the security of the platform that we are running, and Amazon Linux provides the latest and greatest patches with all the packages included, making it easier for us to manage. The best features Amazon Linux offers include a very good package management system where we can quickly install everything, and the packages are compatible and very performant with Graviton processors. Graviton is even cheaper, but we do not have much expertise on running things on Arm processors, so we rely on the operating system, which abstracts us from the Arm processor to the application. Amazon Linux helps us do that, and the performance is so high on these servers. They are fine-tuned in such a way that it can use the best out of the hardware. Amazon Linux has positively impacted our organization. We were running on normal servers which were expensive, and we moved to Graviton servers. If we had used any other operating system, there might have been many packaging issues with the modules that we are using, the classes, the objects, and other components. Amazon Linux comes with all the packages required to run on Graviton, which helped us reduce our cost. We were able to achieve almost 30% more improvement in performance on the servers and almost 10% reduction in cost.

Amazon Linux is currently available mostly in Amazon, but I would like to see it available outside as well. Amazon last provided some security patches that were not very fast, which was one reason I did not rate it higher, along with a few things, such as some particular versions of Python that are not readily available in Amazon Linux.

I have been using Amazon Linux for almost four years.

We have Amazon Linux servers which we have not restarted for almost three years, and the operating system is very robust. Once we received a security patch from Amazon through proactive updates, and we had to update it. Amazon Linux is stable.

Amazon Linux is highly scalable.

Previously, we were using CentOS, and we switched to Amazon Linux for better reliability and continuous support, as Amazon Linux was also a Fedora flavor.

I have seen a return on investment. As I mentioned earlier, we were able to increase the performance by at least 10 to 20% and also reduce the cost by up to 10%.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Amazon Linux is that it was decent, and in fact, it was good.

Before choosing Amazon Linux, I evaluated CentOS as an option.

My advice to others looking into using Amazon Linux is that if you are moving to Graviton servers, Amazon Linux would be the best option, as you will get almost all the packages right away in Amazon Linux. I give this review a rating of 10.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I currently use Amazon Linux for a web application deployed on AWS on EC2. The web application is built on Amazon EC2, which is the virtual machine infrastructure as a code service, and Amazon Linux is Amazon's Linux distribution built for increased efficiency with use on EC2. I have built my web application on EC2 instances in a managed instance group and Amazon Linux is the distribution that I use due to it being hosted on AWS.

I appreciate the fact that Amazon Linux is stripped of unnecessary components, which leads to faster boot times of the EC2 instances. When my web application has to scale, it can do that very quickly because the increased instances in the managed instance group can boot up quicker than if I were using a heavier distribution. The second thing I appreciate is that because it was built by Amazon, it contains pre-installed tooling that I would likely use for the web application or other Amazon applications that I might build. For example, the AWS CLI is already installed on it, along with a Sessions Management Agent and EBS storage drivers.

The combination of features definitely stands out for my day-to-day work. I appreciate the fact that the tooling is already integrated and pre-installed, as it reduces the toil of initial server setup. For a web application where you need that elasticity of instances, maybe scaling up and scaling down, this is really beneficial because they work together seamlessly. Because of the integrated tooling and because the unnecessary components are stripped away, you get faster boot up time and a more efficient service.

It has been positive because Amazon Linux increases the speed of delivery due to the fast boot up times and the integrated tooling. It also helps to be part of our cost reduction strategy as well because with EC2, you can scale the instances up and down. By using Amazon Linux, which is very quick, and EC2, which scales up and down, you can very quickly respond to increased demand of the web application.

In terms of improvements, the one thing I would say which I wish Amazon Linux was better at is that sometimes I find that I need to compile my own software because some dependencies are not within Amazon Linux. It is very lightweight, which is beneficial in some regards, but in other regards, if I have to use other tools with it, maybe different network drivers, I would have to compile that myself. If there were different versions of Amazon Linux based on how heavyweight or lightweight you want it to be, that could be quite good and would allow more flexibility and choice.

I would say the only other limitation, which is to be expected, is that Amazon Linux would lock you into using Amazon if you were to use that distribution, because it would be very difficult to port it on GCP, for example. You probably would not want to do that anyway, so you are locking yourself in, but you would have to accept that if you were to actually use this, which maybe you do not have an issue with, but maybe you would.

Because the package ecosystem of Amazon Linux is lighter than some more popular distributions like Ubuntu or Debian, there may be fewer third-party community packages which other users might want to use, but they might find that they are not able to. In my specific use case, I do not have to use too many third-party packages, so it is not much of a problem, but I would imagine that other users might see that as an issue.

I have been using Amazon Linux for around a year.

Amazon Linux is very stable and is continually maintained by Amazon.

Amazon Linux is highly scalable because it allows for EC2 instances to scale up and down based on what you want, so it is very beneficial.

The customer support for Amazon Linux is great. AWS offers different tiers of support based on how much your cloud spend is and how much you are willing to spend. At the top level, you will get responses from AWS within ten minutes or maybe five minutes, which is world-class service.

Positive

I previously used Ubuntu on EC2. The reason for switching is because, as this is an AWS-native distribution, I found that it was quite handy that the specific tools that I would want to use were already installed on it. Also, because Amazon Linux is maintained by AWS and they offer support for it as well, that was a factor that drew me to use it.

In terms of pricing, because you can scale your instances on how many you want, you have a lot of control over the pricing. With Amazon Linux itself, there is no cost associated with using it, so I would say it is very good from a pricing perspective.

I evaluated Ubuntu before choosing Amazon Linux.

In terms of time saved when instances are booting up, you could easily see ten to twenty percent time savings just because Amazon Linux is a lighter distribution, so it would be quicker for your instances to boot up. Using Amazon Linux, you could very easily see maybe a ten to twenty percent speed increase as opposed to using heavier Linux distributions.

I would recommend others to try Amazon Linux if they are going to run their applications on Amazon. If you are looking to run your applications on different clouds, you might want to prioritize a distribution which is more portable so you can more easily use it across different cloud platforms. I would rate Amazon Linux a nine out of ten.

I switched to a different organization where I am using AWS. We are dealing with EKS and ECS. I work with API Gateways, Amazon Linux, Lambda functions, and S3 storage buckets, among other services. Currently, I am building my own product, which is deployed in AWS services using ECS.

ECS is an excellent service because it has auto-scaling and is easy to manage. Since those are Fargate services, the cost is also lower compared to other options.

AWS has a CloudFront service that functions as an API to deploy all the services, which is the main feature I use. Handling services with Terraform is also effective, and AWS provides an SDK to deploy and create infrastructure-level creations.

With respect to scalability, security, and reliability, these services help me significantly. The application we developed is now more stabilized with these services. In terms of service security, there are many constraint security protocols and policies that help me create our own networks, security groups, and inline policies.

I have not had exposure to migrations, such as from Azure to AWS or GCP to AWS.

A main concern is that security patches and versions are released continuously. For example, EKS versions increase with updates. Our applications are built on the latest versions, which affects upgrades. We need to make modifications at the system and application coding level, and some packages may become outdated. This is impacted by the need to maintain security, which is the standard they want to uphold.

Amazon stops support for older versions of EKS and other services. While they do provide some time for migration, they should provide at least basic support so that if a product does not need to migrate to new versions, that would be a better approach.

Overall, I have been using this for almost six years.

Before starting my organization and building my product, I worked as a developer with multi-cloud platforms including Azure, GCP, and AWS, because my organization was building a multi-cloud platform.

I am paying around $300 to $400 per month because I use many services.

Azure has more charges than GCP and AWS.

Azure and GCP each present different scenarios. We use Terraform because it is scalable and manageable across all clouds.

I believe AWS could introduce a no-cloud approach where, as a developer and customer, I would not need to see infrastructure creations or infrastructure management. The system should be self-healing adaptively, with auto-patches that apply security patches through AI if required. I am more interested in that direction because AI is expanding and the world is moving faster with AI technology.

In terms of pricing, compared to Azure, AWS is more reasonable because both follow a pay-as-you-go model. However, I feel Amazon follows minimal standards of pricing compared to GCP and Azure.

I rate this review a 9.5 overall.

My main use case for Amazon Linux is to deploy websites or applications directly using NGINX, and I also use a containerized platform like Docker on Amazon Linux as well as using Amazon Linux as an NFS server or client for my projects.

Recently, I deployed an event management platform for the institute using NGINX on Amazon Linux, which helped me take inputs from all the students of the institute and give it to the faculty in the form of CSV sheets and notifications, along with feedback forms. We even integrated an automatic certificate generation AI tool, and I found it much easier and better to deploy on Amazon Linux instead of Ubuntu or other operating systems, making it a nice experience as I have been using it for a very long time.

Currently, I am also using Amazon Linux as the server for several projects where I store databases, backends, and the frontend. Since I started using Amazon Linux, I always tell everyone to choose Amazon Linux as it is very much better than other operating systems and provides a proper guide for manual deployment.

Amazon Linux offers several features such as easy access, a proper command-line interface, and simple development and deployment capabilities, including all the features present in other operating systems but with better functionality.

The proper command-line interface in Amazon Linux helps me configure settings easily, and after comparing it to the command-line interface in RHEL and other operating systems, I find Amazon Linux to be absolutely better, making me very satisfied with its features.

When my students ask about which operating system to use, I always recommend Amazon Linux due to its easy access and additional features, positively impacting my institution and enabling my students to work efficiently.

After my institute's faculty and students started using Amazon Linux, their efficiency increased significantly, leading to improvements in their work.

Amazon Linux can be improved by adding more built-in features, allowing easy access to services directly when the operating system is obtained instead of requiring a manual installation.

I have been working on Amazon Linux for the last one year, deploying many websites using Amazon Linux, and I like the file system, similar to RHEL. In fact, they are much better than other operating systems, which is why I prefer Amazon Linux above all others.

Amazon Linux is much more stable than all the other operating systems, particularly compared to Ubuntu, and is easy to access for my needs.

The scalability of Amazon Linux is very significant compared to other operating systems. Since I continually use it, I recognize its advantages, such as the absence of imposed scalability limits by Amazon, and the compatibility of container scalability with Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS, along with performance optimizations and low latency for workloads.

The customer support for Amazon Linux is very much improved. When I try to contact them, I always receive a fast and satisfying reply that resolves my issues.

Before switching to Amazon Linux, I was continuously using Ubuntu as my operating system, but after being introduced to Amazon Linux, I became inspired and made the switch due to my agreement with its capabilities.

I purchased Amazon Linux from the AWS Marketplace.

Recently, by deploying the event management platform, we saved money due to improved efficiency and required fewer employees for the project, highlighting the advantages of using Amazon Linux.

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Amazon Linux are valid for the services provided. I find it fair because it is much better than other operating systems and offers more features, which makes me satisfied with what Amazon Linux provides.

I evaluated other options such as RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Ubuntu, and Fedora before choosing, but Amazon Linux proves to be far better than all of these.

My advice for others considering Amazon Linux is to trust it, as it is a modern, cloud-optimized operating system that provides strong security, predictable updates, seamless cloud platform integrations, and is lightweight and tuned for high-performance applications, making it highly reliable.

Amazon Linux introduces significant improvements in security, update management, and AWS integration, making it a cloud-optimized operating system with features such as SELinux enforced by default, kernel live patching, deterministic upgrades, and flexible version locking, all enhancing its efficiency, scalability, and reliability.

If I were to express my thoughts about Amazon Linux, I would say: In the cloud it rises, light yet strong. A home for workloads all day long. Secure by default, updates in stride. Scaling with EC2 at AWS' side. From kernel patches without a pause to SELinux enforcing every clause. Amazon Linux, tuned and free, the cloud-native heart of efficiency. I rate my experience with Amazon Linux a 9 out of 10.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I am working with Infosys, and the client is Denmark's Bank, Danske Bank, one of the largest banks in Denmark. I am part of a migration project with the bank servers moving from on-premises to AWS cloud. Amazon Linux was purchased from the Amazon Marketplace, and we have OpenShift, the Red Hat OpenShift container platform. As a migration engineer, I am not entirely certain how partnerships work with Amazon. My organization is large and its structure regarding how they manage their relation with AWS cloud is complex. We are using the service, with the OCP cluster purchased from the marketplace running on AWS and managed by Red Hat.

Regarding Amazon Linux, I observe that there is not much difference between Amazon Linux and Red Hat Linux. When I install packages, I notice that Red Hat Linux takes a little more time, and I am uncertain if it is based on the hardware or the security system. The RPM-based package makes it very difficult to install some specific packages in Red Hat Linux, but with Amazon Linux, it is easy to install RPM or DNF packages.

I have been using Amazon Linux for the last one and a half years.

Future features for Amazon Linux, like cost-effectiveness, should be improved because any organization, whether small, a startup company, or a large organization, primarily considers cost. Comparing to Ubuntu, an open-source alternative, I think Amazon Linux could benefit from some cost optimization because it costs a little more than Ubuntu in Indian Rupees.

Regarding maintenance for Amazon Linux, sometimes it requires maintenance similar to how Red Hat provides end-to-end support for Red Hat Linux.

Regarding Amazon Linux support, we used to raise tickets for any issues related to it. We connect on chat or interact with AWS engineers for critical issues. With the support system for Amazon Linux, I feel there is a lack compared to Red Hat, which provides a stronger support system.

I have overall experience of 6+ years, with six years, nine or ten months as of this January.

Regarding the stability of Amazon Linux, we are migrating thousands of servers from on-premises to AWS cloud for Danske Bank. I observed that while patching and updates from Red Hat systems are handled easily, with Amazon Linux we need to take extra care, particularly with legacy systems, since the latest versions work fine without issues.

In my experience with Amazon's technical support, all issues are resolved whenever I connect with their engineers, but the communication levels can be somewhat different, such as a priority system. I would give a score of 8.5 to 9 out of 10.

Positive

From an installation point of view for Amazon Linux, there is nothing difficult as we are using Terraform for deployment purposes. We use the Amazon provided AMI directly and deploy it, just as we do with other Linux flavors such as Ubuntu or Red Hat.

From my personal and system perspective, I have experienced over the last one year that any packages run easily in Amazon Linux, which I would recommend because I am a cloud engineer for AWS cloud for the last six plus years and I am aware of how these things are involved. For Amazon Linux overall, I give it nine out of ten because it executes commands very smoothly, and that is what I appreciate about it. I would rate this review nine out of ten.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)