Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), announced last week a new Linux machine image for its Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2) cloud computing service.
The Linux AMI (Amazon Machine Image), a service that is supported and maintained, provides a secure, stable, and high-performance execution environment to Linux applications.
“Today, we announce the 2015.09 Amazon Linux AMI,” the company stated in a blog post. It is available in all regions and for all current-generation EC2 instance type types. The Amazon Linux AMI supports both HVM and PV modes, as well as both EBS and Instance Store-backed AMIs. HVM stands for hardware virtual machines. PV stands for paravirtual. According to AWS, the main difference between PV AMIs and HVM AMIs lies in the way they boot and whether they can use special hardware extensions (CPU and network) for better performance. EBS stands for Elastic Block Store. It provides persistent block-level storage volumes to EC2.
AWS stated that the 4.1.7 kernel is a major new feature in this release. It is the longest-term stable kernel release. Many customers are particularly interested in the support for OverlayFS within the 4.x kernel series.
The new Linux AMI also includes an updated PostgreSQL version up to 9.4 and MySQL 5.6. These packages are now available separately from the earlier versions. Updates to the Docker container service, and Go programming language are also new. AWS stated that the update to Go 1.4 was included in the lead-up to 2015.09 release. The AMI also updated Rust programming language support from version 1.0 up to 1.2.