Comparing Linux-based operating systems from AWS

AWS offers a variety of Linux-based operating systems that are stable, high performing and focused on security. These can be used to host containers or your workloads depending on your use case.

Currently there are three variants available, with one other older variant having already reached its EOL. A high-level overview is provided below for the each of them-

1. Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) is the next generation of Amazon Linux, ideal for general purpose workloads on AWS.
   • AL2023 will be supported till 2028.
   • AL2023 has gives you control over how and when you absorb updates by locking to a specific version of the Amazon Linux package repository.
   • AL2023 also provides the ability to get frequent updates and comes with features to help you meet your compliance needs.
2. Amazon Linux 2 (AL2)
   • AL2 is supported until June 30, 2025. Hence it is recommended to migrate to AL2023, which is supported until 2028 as mentioned earlier.
   • AL2 supports the latest Amazon EC2 instance capabilities and is tuned for optimal performance on AWS.
   • AL2 is also offered as a virtual machine and container image for on-premises development and testing.
   • For enabling to patch security vulnerabilities without rebooting the instance, it comes with kernel live patching functionality.
3. Bottlerocket is a minimal Linux-based operating system purpose built to host container workloads.
   • It is designed to be secure and includes only the essential software needed to run containers.
   • Bottlerocket makes it easy to keep your nodes up-to-date using container orchestrators like EKS or ECS, lowering management overhead.
   • Updates to Bottlerocket are applied in a single step and can be rolled back if necessary
   • It is open-source and follows an open development model.
   • It is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
   • It has built-in integrations with AWS services for container orchestration, registries, and observability.
4. Amazon Linux 1 (AL1)
   • AL1 reached its end-of-life (EOL) on December 31, 2023 and is not receiving any security updates or bug fixes after January 1, 2024
   • AL1 came pre-installed with many AWS API tools and CloudInit. AWS API tools enabled scripting of important provisioning tasks from within an Amazon EC2 instance. CloudInit allowed passing instance configuration actions to instances at launch time via the EC2 user-data fields, enabling remote configuration of Amazon EC2 instances.

More information can be obtained from this link on Amazon's website.