Amazon Linux 2 Benchmarks, 6-Way Linux OS EC2 Compute Cloud Comparison
With Amazon AWS this week having released Amazon Linux 2 LTS I was excited to put this updated cloud-focused operating system through some performance tests to see how it stacks up with the more well known Linux distributions.
Amazon Linux 2 LTS is making use of the Linux 4.9 LTS kernel (it's also been similar to the current 4.9 kernel in Amazon Linux AMI 2017.09) but more notable is the default system compiler upgrade from GCC 4.8.5 to GCC 7.2.1. Also a significant change with Amazon Linux 2 is they are finally making use of systemd.
Amazon Linux 2 remains an RPM-based Linux distribution and does continue to pull in some Enterprise Linux 7 fundamentals, including now using the XFS file-system by default rather than EXT4.
Amazon Linux 2 has been working out fine in my Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) testing thus far. And with it running well with the Phoronix Test Suite I couldn't help but to also carry out some comparison benchmarks to other Linux distributions in the Cloud. The OS images tested were:
- Amazon Linux AMI 2017.09
- Amazon Linux 2
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7.4
- Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
- SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP3
All of these Linux distributions were tested using the m4.4xlarge instance type on 15 December in the US East 2 data-center. The m4.4xlarge instance type has 16 vCPUs yielding a rated 53.5 Elastic Compute Units (ECU) and 64GiB of system memory. At this time in testing, all the m4.4xlarge instances were backed by an Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 processor type.
Each of these Linux distributions tested on Amazon EC2 were run out-of-the-box as deployed from the AWS marketplace.