Amazon launches Amazon Linux 2

Amazon announced the release of Amazon Linux 2, a Linux server operating system from Amazon Web Services. Amazon promises to provide a modern application environment with the latest enhancements happening around in Linux community and offering a long term support with Amazon Linux 2.

Amazon Linux 2 is best suited for hosting web and desktop based applications, open source and proprietary database and more. It supports the latest Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance features and includes packages which can easily be integrated with AWS.

Features of Amazon Linux 2

• Amazon Linux 2 provides support to latest Amazon EC2 instance and includes packages that helps in easy integration with other AWS services. 
• Amazon Linux 2 is offered as a virtual machine and container image and can be used for a test and production environment for developing and testing application. It provides full integration to AWS services.
• Amazon Linux 2 comes with AWS CLI (Command Line Integration) and cloud-init, designed to simplify the scripting tasks.
• Amazon Linux 2 is a long-term support release without any extra cost. It includes security updates and bug fixes for 5 years and also include the API compatibility for the same timeframe. 
• It provides the Amazon Linux Extras repository which includes additional software packages like Python, Go, Rust, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and others. 
• It includes systemd init system to manage system processes and better booting time along with better performance.
• Amazon Linux 2 uses 4.9 LTS kernel and has been tuned to run efficiently in any virtualized environment including AWS. 
• There are virtual machine images for KVM, VirtualBox, Hyper-V and VMware, in case you want to test an application on your personal system before pushing it to AWS. 

The virtual machine images can be downloaded from Amazon Linux Page

Amazon Linux 2 is not a general purpose yet-another Linux distribution. The main purpose here is to design an enhance Linux distro best suited for AWS platform.

The fact that it offers virtual machine images and is not just limited to its own platform gives the users a choice to design, develop and test their application on their local machine. The Amazon Linux Extra provides a fully supported environment for the latest version of  a wide variety of application.

It clearly looks as a competitor to Intel's Clear Linux, being platform specific and Amazon is trying to improve its Amazon Web Services platform by providing a native Linux OS with optimized performance and support to newer versions of different applications.