CIS Hardened Image Level 2 on Amazon Linux 2

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.

Positive

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.

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.

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.

My main use case for Amazon Linux  is mostly deploying servers using NGINX  and application runner, and I use it as a base image in Amazon Linux  itself when I write any Docker  file.

In my current project, investment.in, I use Amazon Linux as a web server as well.

The best features Amazon Linux offers, in my opinion, are the yum command and the packages that are already included, along with other packages that I can easily install in the Linux environment.

These features help me in my daily work by making automation very easy.

Amazon Linux has positively impacted my organization by increasing productivity since automation is easy and fast, allowing me to set up servers easily, thus productivity increases and efficiency improves as soon as possible while deploying my application using Amazon Linux.

For the improvement of Amazon Linux, I think there should be UI features in the future, as Amazon Linux currently has only terminal capabilities without a UI, and I hope to see documentation updates as soon as possible so when documentation expires, I am updating it and referring to it soon.

When using Amazon Linux, I would prefer if any command goes wrong that an auto-command feature would appear there.

I chose eight out of ten because command line improvement is needed along with UI features, and the second thing is that you can use auto-command line features.

I do not think there are any other improvements Amazon Linux needs right now, maybe something related to security, performance, or compatibility.

My advice for others looking into using Amazon Linux is to make sure the command line is easy and that Amazon Linux has more performance than other Linux environments and is more secure than other Linux environments as well.

I have been using Amazon Linux for more than five years, because I started using Amazon Linux in college.

I have more to add about how I use Amazon Linux; using the command, using shell machines, and using the terminals in Amazon Linux could be a great experience.

I would like to add that Amazon Linux is easy to use with the command line and also user-friendly, with no need to download any third-party updates like RPM packages and then install; I just use the command line only to download directly and install directly.

I purchased Amazon Linux through the AWS Marketplace .

I think next time with Amazon Linux, whenever a bad command is returned, it could be auto-generated to create the perfect command, and that is something you can implement.

I give this product a rating of eight out of ten.

We primarily use Amazon Linux  for the deployment of Amazon machine instances. We also use it for loading up our packages for building Docker  images inside it and for many different cases where we usually utilize it.

Recently, we used Amazon Linux to host running web servers using Apache and Nginx, and we were also working on a project for deploying some backend services like Node.js, Python, and Ruby. We hosted some APIs and microservices on these instances. We are using it as the default common operating system for the Amazon EC2  instances, and it helps us in many different ways, especially since our EKS cluster is a self-provisioned cluster, as we are using Amazon Linux instances as the provisioned instances.

The positive impact of Amazon Linux on my organization is significant, as it has improved organizational security by closing known vulnerabilities quickly, reducing the risk of hacking and malware, resulting in fewer security incidents and lower breach risk. Financially, Amazon Linux is cost-effective and prevents costly data breaches and downtimes, saving considerable money and protecting the company's revenue. It also simplifies compliance and audits such as HIPAA, making it easy for us to get audit approvals while ensuring the organization stays legally compliant and increases system stability by fixing bugs and kernel issues.

The best features that Amazon Linux offers, based on my day-to-day activities, are that it is optimized for AWS . It is tuned for EC2  instances, has fast boot times, and works seamlessly with AWS  services including EC2, EBS, S3 , and IAM . It is also free with no licensing cost, does not require a subscription, and is included in AWS usage, making it cost-effective. Amazon Linux 2 offers five years of support, includes a lot of security patches, and has secure defaults. I find it valuable that even the kernel is optimized for efficient memory and CPU management.

In my day-to-day work, the features of Amazon Linux help significantly, especially with system stability and performance. Additionally, the pre-built AMI images in Amazon Linux are easy to create, and creating custom AMIs is straightforward. It is also developer-friendly and cloud DevOps-friendly. The package management is stable, using YUM and AWS-maintained repositories. Security features assist us as a company since security teams detect vulnerabilities, and security issues reported show common vulnerability exposures, providing reports almost through using Trivy  while utilizing the EC2 instance. AWS can analyze those vulnerabilities, implement fixes, and test to ensure the systems remain stable.

Speaking of challenges I faced with Amazon Linux, some other use cases I used it for include building containers that I take and store in my Amazon ECR , and the main challenge I usually faced was vendor lock-in, as the design is mainly for AWS. It has limited optimization and support outside AWS, and for us to migrate loads to another cloud, it requires many changes. The community support is also limited because it is smaller compared to Ubuntu  or Debian , and there are fewer third-party tutorials and troubleshooting guides for Amazon Linux, so we must heavily rely on AWS documentation. It is still a great tool but has a learning curve and cannot really be compared to other Linux distributions.

Although I am a DevOps engineer and do not have specific metrics readily available, I am aware that patch deployment time is notably efficient, as critical patches are usually applied within less than 48 hours from release. For unpatched common vulnerability exposures, the instances of these were near zero for high or critical CVEs. This assures efficiency and reveals that we did not experience many security incidents due to unpatched systems, although I do not have specific figures for that.

Personally, from my own experience with Amazon Linux, I can suggest improving the patch compliance rate by automating patching using the systems manager patch, scheduling automatic patch windows, and enforcing patch baselines to achieve higher compliance and fewer missed systems. Standardizing operating system images by using golden AMIs with the latest images could also help, as new systems are built by default while removing unused software would be beneficial.

Further improvements needed for Amazon Linux include ensuring compatibility beyond AWS, which would be very useful, as well as enhancing GUI support since it is primarily focused on server workloads. A better graphical user interface based on admin tools would be great, and providing more frequent runtime updates for languages such as Python, Node.js, and Java, which currently lag behind in their latest releases, would also be beneficial. Additionally, improving monitoring and reporting features while integrating patch and security dashboards would be useful.

I have been using Amazon Linux  for a year now.

Amazon Linux is really stable. As I highlighted, it has higher reliability and fewer crashes and issues, as well as a better security posture with less risk of security breaches.

Amazon Linux handles scalability well for my needs. Especially when integrated with autoscaling groups on ECS and EKS, it scales effectively, with minimal problems from my experience. Even the cooling down process after scaling out or scaling down does not cause many headaches, and you only pay for what you use, which makes it great.

For customer support, we are on a support plan maintained by AWS. The team I am working with mainly uses the developer plan, while those in production often use the enterprise plan for dedicated support and architectural help. The support primarily covers installation issues, operating system problems, and networking, and while they provide helpful resources such as GitHub  links and blogs for general issues, we often conduct our own research, as our company has experts working with Linux in the infrastructure.

Negative

I have been using Amazon Linux ever since I joined the company; therefore, I have not used a different solution.

Amazon Linux is best suited for EC2 workloads, ECS, EKS containers, and AWS-native applications. You can use it for production workloads because it is stable and secure, and without license fees, you can expect lower costs compared to Red Hat Linux and Windows, providing a great return on investment for cloud-native workloads. If your application requires very new software versions, you may need additional repositories or manual installations, such as Docker  containers using custom images. The ability to patch regularly, apply patches on time, and utilize the patch manager is a key advantage. Amazon Linux offers many use cases and is recommended for microservices, making it great for security purposes by using IAM  roles and security groups properly while integrating with CloudWatch for monitoring.

Compared to Ubuntu  and other Linux distributions, Amazon Linux has worse support, which often leads us to rely heavily on documentation. Additionally, there are fewer third-party tutorials available for Amazon Linux. Furthermore, it still needs improved package availability, as some newer software versions are missing. Amazon Linux has smaller repositories than Ubuntu, so providing more up-to-date packages and expanding official repositories would help. Easier version upgrades and stronger multi-cloud support beyond AWS, reducing vendor lock-in, would enhance its overall effectiveness.

We usually purchase Amazon Linux through the AWS Marketplace .

Since I joined the company, they have been using Amazon Linux, and I would not know what specific options were previously evaluated. However, Amazon Linux was chosen for its faster deployment times, which means less configuration time for the operating systems and quicker time to market. It has lower maintenance costs, requires less admin workload, offers automated patching, and is highly reliable with fewer crashes and issues.

I rate Amazon Linux at seven out of ten on an overall scale.