I’m going to install a new server and want to understand if there is any advantage in installing the Amazon Linux AMI in comparation to Ubuntu or another distribution.
This server will be consuming amazon resources like S3, lambda, redshift, etc.
I'm not very comfortable with the CentOSy Amazon AMI, but if there is any advantage in using that I can get used to it.
Amazon Linux 2 is “the official AWS distro” and is in some ways better prepared to run on AWS. For example Amazon Linux 2 comes with all the aws tools and libs preinstalled, on Ubuntu you may have to install some manually - no big deal.
In the end either one will work and if you’re more comfortable with a deb-based distro use Ubuntu.
My experience is that Amazon Linux is poorly documented with little community support. It's never quite clear if it's based on Centos or another distro, so finding how to do things can take time. When you want to do anything it can take a lot longer than Ubuntu, which has a huge number of users and great community support.
The software available in Amazon Linux repos is quite limited, and often out of date. Ubuntu in comparison has a large library and it's relatively up to date. With Amazon Linux I have had to resort to downloading source and building it myself, which is annoying as it means you have to update it occasionally, or add repos that have the software.
When I replace my personal "snow flake" Amazon Linux 1 server I'll be going with Ubuntu LTS. However, if I was doing auto scaling and automated deployments for a company that has an AWS support contract I'd consider Amazon Linux 2 as it's probably better tuned for AWS than other OS's and AWS support is excellent.
