News
AWS Offers Updated Linux Machine Image
Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) last week announced a new Linux machine image on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud computing service.
The Linux AMI (Amazon Machine Image) is a supported and maintained service designed to provide a stable, secure, and high-performance execution environment for Linux applications.
"Today we announce the 2015.09 Amazon Linux AMI, which is supported in all regions and on all current-generation EC2 instance types," the company said in a blog post. "The Amazon Linux AMI supports both PV and HVM mode, as well as both EBS-backed and Instance Store-backed AMIs." PV stands for paravirtual, while HVM stands for hardware virtual machine. "The main difference between PV and HVM AMIs is the way in which they boot and whether they can take advantage of special hardware extensions (CPU, network, and storage) for better performance," according to the AWS site. EBS stands for Elastic Block Store, which provides persistent block-level storage volumes for EC2.
"A major new feature in this release is the 4.1.7 kernel, which is the most recent long-term stable release kernel," AWS said. "Of particular interest to many customers is the support for OverlayFS in the 4.x kernel series."
Other improvements to the new Linux AMI include an updated PostgreSQL version, up to 9.4, and MySQL 5.6, now both available as packages separate from earlier version. Also new are updates to the Docker container service and Go programming language. "The lead-up to the 2015.09 release included an update to Go 1.4 and to Docker 1.7.1," AWS said. The AMI also updated support for the Rust programming language, from version 1.0 to 1.2.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.