Amazon Linux 2023 Reaches GA, Built Atop Fedora

AWS released Amazon Linux 2023 "AL2023" as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution that is available to Amazon EC2 customers.

Prior Amazon Linux releases were built from multiple upstream sources while with Amazon Linux 2023 they have now publicly noted that the distribution is "is based on Fedora, but isn't directly compatible with any particular release of Fedora."

Amazon Linux 2023 offers many updates over the former Amazon Linux 2, further security enhancements, and other quality of life improvements for Amazon Web Services customers. Amazon Linux 2023 also features boot speed optimizations, SELinux is enabled by default, OpenSSL 3 is in use, XFS is the root file-system, and there are numerous package updates including to the default compiler toolchain.

Amazon Linux 2023 is available now in all AWS regions. Moving forward AWS intends to issue major Amazon Linux updates every two years. More details on AL2023 via the AWS blog. In the coming days I will have up some comparison Amazon Linux 2023 performance benchmarks on Phoronix.