What is the difference between Amazon Linux and RedHat Enterprise Linux on AWS EC2?

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What is the difference between Amazon Linux and RedHat Enterprise Linux on AWS EC2?
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Amazon may have taken the top spot as a cloud services platform, but Red Hat Certification still holds a unique place in itself.  

Amazon Linux, was originally based on the Red Hat, is a streamlined distribution that would be optimized to run on EC2 instances. It is tailored to meet the challenges of the platform and supplying a number of tools to integrate seamlessly with the services of the EC2.

So, let’s discuss some of the differences between the Amazon Linux and RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux)

Integration

Both distributions are going to be offered in the EC2 environment as an AMI.  This makes it easy to instantiate a new environment with only a few clicks away. You can spin up either of these environments in just a matter of minutes. Where these OS’s differ is in the level of integration that Amazon has included with just for the namesake distribution.  It has included standard tools that would be improving integration and performance with its EC2 environment.   

Red Hat doesn’t offer these tools as a standard package which would be included with the distribution, but many of these tools could be installed separately as per the requirements from repositories.

One downside to the tight integration of Amazon Linux to EC2 is the fact that Amazon Linux environments are fixed at one place and cannot be migrated to another cloud platform.  A decision to separate from EC2 means that you would have to migrate to a different distribution.  While this is not an insurmountable hurdle, it is something to be conscious of when we are choosing a distribution.  This coupling also presents an issue when it comes to development environments.  Because Amazon Linux could only be run on EC2, the development and QA systems must also be on EC2. This again is a downside of Amazon as it is going to add cost to the project, while not completely negligible, these costs would be low if you spin down the systems at end of the day and do not use much data throughput or have large perseverance layers.

Well, in fact, the RHEL could be set up on any server which includes both local as well as EC2 this allows your development and QA team to work seamlessly between the local as well as cloud development instances.  This could represent savings if you might be having local hardware that would be used for this purpose.  This independence also would again allow you to let your environment migrate to another cloud provider or server in general.  

If you are not sure that you would stay a part of the Amazon EC2 family, it may be a good idea so as to steer yourself to clear of their platform specific OS.  Using Amazon Linux might make things a bit challenging if you decide to switch providers.

Performance:

While, if we look forward to this aspect also, many of the aspirants may conclude from an Amazon curated distribution, integration, and performance are tailored to the EC2 cloud environment.  Amazon Linux offers rolling updates that would be including performance enhancing tools and security features which would be specific to the EC2.

You might find the benchmarks of Amazon Linux and RHEL running on EC2 if you do a bit research online.  From this benchmark, Amazon Linux might be offering better performance in some areas.  But Red Hat Certification is considered to be the best on in comparison to Amazon.

Now you are in a clear state of mind and if you decide to have the RedHat certification, then to get trained with a good training institute may consider being mandatory. So get yourself involved in a well-reputed training center like the SPOTO.