Linux on AWS

The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It is designed to provide a stable, secure, and high performance execution environment for applications running on Amazon EC2. It supports the latest EC2 instance type features and includes packages that enable easy integration with AWS. Amazon Web Services provides ongoing security and maintenance updates to all instances running the Amazon Linux AMI. The Amazon Linux AMI is provided at no additional charge to Amazon EC2 users.

The Amazon Linux AMI comes pre-installed with many AWS API tools and CloudInit. AWS API tools enable scripting of important provisioning tasks from within an Amazon EC2 instance. CloudInit allows passing instance configuration actions to instances at launch time via the EC2 user-data fields, enabling remote configuration of Amazon EC2 instances.