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by dagw 3114 days ago
In theory, since the kernel is specifically tuned towards running on EC2 virtual machines (by the people who know EC2 virtual machines better than anyone) as opposed to 'generic' hardware, performance might be slightly better.

Also, and for many more importantly, it's probably easier to get support from Amazon if you're using their official Linux as opposed to a third party distribution.
2 comments
slgeorge 3114 days ago
Your first point is not true compared to Ubuntu at least [0]. AWS is basically are repackaged version of KVM (the last time I checked), so there's no particular advantage. Ubuntu (and I'm sure Centos/RHEL) provide custom images which have the same optimised code.

[0] I'm pretty sure it's true for CentOS / RHEL, I just don't know for a fact.

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geofft 3114 days ago
AWS is mostly Xen (they just introduced a KVM option https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-compute-inten... ), and there are a few things like "enhanced networking" where you get a performance boost if you're on a kernel with support but it's still functional if you're on any other kernel.
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lscotte 3114 days ago
Ubuntu has kernels specifically tuned for different cloud providers in LTS releases. For AWS, it's the linux-aws package.
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