AWS and SUSE Leaders on the Evolution of Amazon Linux and AL 2023 | AWS re:Invent 2025

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to our coverage of AWS Reinvent 2025. It's been an interesting two days of packed full of information and announcements, innovation, a lot of ai, and a lot more too.

Um, glad you can join us. This next panel promises to be one of our best, so I'm, I'm glad you're here to watch it with us. Let me introduce you to our panel members, and then I'll talk about, I'll let you know what we're talking about.

I wanna start on my far right, gentlemen. Well, there's only two gentlemen here, me and him. So let me start with Spencer.

Sure. Spencer, if you wouldn't mind. Yeah.

So I'm Spencer Dillard. I lead, uh, EC2 EEC two's Edge businesses, uh, including, uh, local zones, a BS Outposts. Uh, but for today, more relevant.

I also lead our Amazon Linux, uh, commercial Linux and Windows businesses, uh, in addition to some other areas of AWS. And I've been at AWS since 2011. Uh, so lived through quite a few changes and excited to talk about what we're doing.

Absolutely. Spencer, welcome and thanks for being here. Next is Spencer.

We have Sri. And Sri, if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself. Yeah.

Hey, everyone, I'm ri Ku, I'm a product manager for Amazon Linux. I've been with Amazon Linux for around three and a half years. I'm excited to talk to you more about Amazon Linux and our new features, um, for it.

Thank you. Ri and, and to my immediate right, you may have seen her on, uh, one or two already of our panels and, and interviews here at, uh, AWS Reinvent Coverage. Christine, I'm Christine Puccio.

I lead our AWS growth strategy, uh, for suse. And, um, been doing that for about a couple years now, and it's, uh, it's been, this year has just been so packed with so many great, um, announcements, and I'm really excited to talk about what we're gonna talk about today. Yes.

We're going to, we're gonna, we're gonna focus in today a lot on Amazon Linux, but I, I just, I want to preface all this with, you know, Christina, it is, you, you kind of shepherd the AWS, uh, SUSE relationship. And, and in my mind, at the very highest level, I think bear's repeating, it's a strategic relationship, and it was announced as a strategic relationship on, on a lot of different levels here. Right.

This Amazon, Linux is one of three or four different areas we, we've been, you know, looking at over the last day or two. Um, so it, it's an important relationship to suer it's an important relationship to AWS and, and I think it good job, you know, nice job. Many, Many people involved as Well.

No, I know, but you know what? Someone heads it up and, and is respond. I've always learned, I've done a lot, I've done four or five startups in my life and, and a lesson I learned, if it's not someone's full-time job, it doesn't get done.

Mm-hmm. So That's what they told me. That's Why I got the Position.

I've learned that the hard way. So good for you. Um, but guys, let's kick it off, right?

What I, I wanna focus in, as I said today on the Amazon Linux piece of it. Now, our audience out here, everyone knows AWS everyone knows AWS gives you a lot of choices around Linux, including Seuss for Seuss for what, 20 something years, or as long as there's been an AWS. Mm-hmm.

But Amazon Linux is a, is a, a different kind of animal, right? It's Amazon's Linux mm-hmm. Tree.

You are the Amazon Linux expert, aren't you? So, let's, let's start here for people who may not be as familiar, maybe with what is Amazon Linux? What makes it special?

Mm-hmm. What, what are some unique characteristics? I know it's going through a regeneration as well mm-hmm.

Share with our audience, if you will. Sure. Um, Amazon Linux is a Linux distribution that was created by AWS, and it was developed by AWS, uh, it's also being maintained by AWS uh, the first version of Amazon Linux was launched in, uh, 2010, actually, 2025, uh, mark's, uh, 15th year birthday for Amazon Linux.

So, wow. It's a, a special year for us, Uhhuh. Uh, so it's been a long time.

Uh, 15 years is a long time, and we've learned a lot from our customers from the changes happening upstream. Um, so it, it's, uh, it's been fantastic to see the evolution of Amazon Linux over these 15 years. Um, the latest version is, uh, AL 2023.

Uh, when I say Al, it is short for Amazon Linux. So, uh, for the audience, it's easy to understand. Um, so Amazon Linux is, uh, mainly, um, uh, used because it is optimized for AWS, it comes with deep, uh, AWS uh, integrations, uh, with various other services.

Um, for example, E-K-S-E-C-S, um, A-W-S-C-L-I, um, and various other services that you can think of. Um, it helps, uh, reduce, um, operational burden for, uh, our users because, um, think of, uh, it as, like, when you're launching an instance, for example, you have to think of various parameters. For example, network configurations, attaching IAM roles or EBS volumes, et cetera.

And Amazon Linux has integrations with all of these, so that when you launch an instance on EC2, it just works out of the box. And, uh, not la uh, last but not the least is, um, Amazon Linux helps you lower your cost of, uh, um, ownership. Yeah.

So how does it do this? While our customers still pay for the compute resources, um, Amazon Linux is free of cost. It has no licensing fee.

And on top of that, the AWS support is included as part of Amazon Linux. This is, it's like, you know, really it's a big thing for our customers. So all these factors make Amazon Linux special.

And Spencer, please add on. Sure. Uh, I, I think a few of the things I would add, I mean, uh, really great introduction overview of, of, uh, why it matters to us.

Um, it's Amazon Linux is used by basically every AWS team internally. It's used for our own infrastructure. Um, and, you know, it is a fedora based os.

Mm-hmm. Uh, it originally started as a, a Red Hat, uh, clone. Uh, a few years ago we shifted to being, uh, fedora based, which has introduced, uh, a number of aspects that, that drive our thinking, uh, going forward.

And in addition to the total cost of ownership that, that Shari mentioned, um, we really see it as critical to the security that is important to our customers. The, um, that one of our most important properties to is to ensure that we are providing UpToDate patches. We often support kernels that are older, uh, which is, you know, good challenge, uh, but we're really trying to focus on security and ensuring that we, uh, are providing as secure a solution as possible while where possible really minimizing the effort for customers to have to be forced into a migration or things like that.

Obviously, at some point you have to, uh, and at the same time, we're also providing, uh, out of the box integrations with things like elastic fabric adapter, elastic network adapter, uh, drivers for AI and, and NVIDIA chips and various things. So really ensuring that whatever you want to run on a s it will work on Amazon Linux. And so we're really excited about what we've done to make sure that more customers and users can, uh, run their workloads on Amazon Linux.

Absolutely. Cherri, you mentioned the latest version is, uh, AL 20 23 3. Correct.

And, but in terms of backward compatibility, my understanding is we're gonna end of life support for AL 2022. Uh, it's called AL two. Oh, excuse me.

Yeah. A two. Okay.

Yeah. When, when, and that, and that's pretty imminent. Uh, that's right.

So, end of support for AAL two is upcoming, uh, on June 30th, 2026. So approximately six months from now, that's when, uh, that'll go. That version a L two will go, uh, on end of support.

And a L 2023 is the latest. I would imagine, though, it's a rather seamless experience to migrate or update from a L two to a L 2023. It, it really depends a lot on, on what the customer is using.

And one of the key reasons that the partnership with seus has been really important is that it unblocks a lot of cases where customers have been challenged. Because moving from, uh, red Hat Enterprise Linux clone to, you know, uh, fedora based has really, you know, has met a shift in what packages are available, uh, for especially, uh, the Apple packages that were available on Red Hat repos. Those, those need a solution, right?

And customers don't generally want to go build and compile and download the source and deal with their own patching. So being able to provide these additional packages is essential to reducing the effort for customers to migrate. Uh, and going forward, this is something that we really see as absolutely central to our vision for Amazon Linux is ensuring that, uh, first and foremost, we are maintaining security.

That that will be our top priority and continue to be. But borderline more important is migration and minimizing the effort. Because the reality is, if there is effort to migrate, then many customers won't.

And in not migrating, they actually end up being less secure. So in many ways, that migration, uh, Friction is actually scary. Can Trump security as a, as a, you know, te as a tenant that we consider?

Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Um, so I, I, you know, you mentioned Fedora.

I'm not gonna get into the whole Red Hat Stuff. Yep. Stuff.

Leave it. That's, that's a good word. Stuff.

But what I, what I do wanna mention is the idea of enterprise Linux, right? Mm-hmm. Now, SUSE has an, an enterprise Linux, and I always do the initials, but you guys call it s***s.

I used say SLES, but you know, tomato, tomato, um, it's a, it's a true enterprise. Linux Red Hat has an enterprise Linux too. Amazon Linux is an enterprise Linux tool.

And that's really what I want to emphasize for the audience here, right? It's an enterprise Linux distribution. Um, and so it is, it, it's strategic, right?

Mm-hmm. Now, let me pivot to announcements, right? Beyond the strategic relationship between SUSE and, and that Red Hat I, I spoke about, there was some specific Amazon Linux suse, um, integrations, partnership kind of announcements.

Christine is your baby. Oh, Well, I think I, well, first of all, this has probably been one of the most, um, I don't know, heartfelt projects that I've, I've worked on, because I think it was a, a first of two, um, companies coming together that traditionally could be competing for the same, you know, workloads. But it was having the engineers from our side, um, you know, our Linux group and, and your side just coming together and building a concept and requirements document, and really looking at how we address security together.

How do we address building the packages? What packages, what packages do we prioritize based on customer feedback? And it was, and at first it was funny to see the engineers and everybody in the room together, because they're like, why are we here together?

Yeah. But it's, it, at the end of the day, our value at our company is about choice. Mm-hmm.

And our, we know that our customers are always going to operate various different workloads on various different operating systems. And so it just became, you know, we were able to help in this instance, and not just provide packages, but actually, uh, increase the, the, you know, volume of time that it would take in order to do that themselves. And I think that's where the unique partnership is in this, and why I was, so when I first saw this project, um, and, and was read into it, I was like, wow, this is, this is really super cool, and this is kind of a first, and I really love working on, on those types of projects.

And it, it has been a real pleasure to, to work with, uh, Amazon and AWS on this. Likewise, I don't think we mentioned the term, and I want to make sure we get it out here, and that is, I, again, I say the initials, you say their name, but SPAL, SP Sal Al s pal. Yes.

That's why I say the initials and say, but SPAL spout, and, and you know, that's what you're referring to a lot here. And, and it is unique. Think about this, right?

You are taking packages that in essence, exist in Cuse Enterprise Linux and making them portable and usable by Amazon Linux. And look, there's a great day for open source, because that's what open source is about, right? The ability to, to have portable code like this Absolutely.

That move from one Linux to the other, somewhere Linus is smiling on them, right? And, um, and so it's, it's, I've never heard, honestly, I've never heard of anything like it, but it's, it's, it's really cool. Yeah.

And I, I think one of the things that has enabled this is that we have a common, you know, value of allowing, enabling choice. And, you know, from the AWS perspective, we don't want to tell customers how to run their workloads. We want to advise them where there are things that they should be aware of or concerned about, et cetera.

But our goal is to make sure that they can achieve solving the problems they need to solve, however that is. And so it's pretty natural working together to say, you know, at the end of the day, that is what this is about, is making sure that customers can choose the solution that's right for them. And, you know, Amazon Linux may not be right for some others.

That's okay. What we care about is that customers can solve their problems. Yeah.

Agreed. Let's, if you wouldn't mind, and, and Shea, I hope I'm asking the right person this, but I I, let's peel that back a little bit. The, the specific packages.

What, what kind of functionality or, you know, what's in these packages? Sure. Um, so Amazon Linux actually has, uh, approximately 2,500 packages already.

Um, a lot of our customers use these packages, uh, which are a part of the core repository. Mm-hmm. Uh, however, there are some packages that helps you, um, increase the productivity, uh, for a developer or for a system administrator.

Uh, for example, uh, let's take the package called as r uh, R is used for statistical analysis like, uh, and programming. Uh, and this kind of package was not a part of the core Amazon Linux. It is an extra or an additional package.

So you actually would find these packages, uh, as part of the Apple, uh, repository. Apple is extra packages for Enterprise Linux. Um, and, uh, uh, our customers, as they were migrating from a L two to a 2023, wanted to know these packages.

Like, Hey, I, I use this package, I rely on this package. Can you help me, uh, provide these packages? Because otherwise the choice that our customers have is to build these packages from source, which, if you can imagine, consumes a lot of time resource, and they have to maintain it, which is a huge deal.

Yeah. Right. So, uh, on, on our customers request, uh, we understood that, uh, okay, some of our customers rely on these Apple packages.

Um, and that's why, um, we had to bring these packages to a L 2023. Now, to do that, uh, that is where we partnered with suse, uh, on getting the Apple packages and making it compatible for a 2023. Correct?

Yes. So that was the partnership, and this is called as sal or supplementary packages for Amazon Linux. Uh, it is a dedicated repository, um, that work that has thousands of packages, like Christine was saying, we started prioritizing these packages based on our customer's feedback, right?

Our customers, uh, provided feedback on GitHub or via support, uh, or TAM'S technical account managers. And that's how we know that these are the packages our customers are looking for. And that is what we prioritized in the initial phase.

One. One thing I, if you don't mind, that is also that Susa has been critical to also help identify some of the, you know, the areas and packages that Yeah. They see widely used that they see as being critical, because, you know, we have sometimes have different lenses, so that, that expertise has also been very valuable.

Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.

No, I think, um, the other part to this too is that there's, there's like over 8,000 packages mm-hmm. Within, is it epel? Epel, right?

Yep. Narrowing that down to try, and I think I wanna really talk about like how long it took, not even long, but like how critical the discussions were to talk about what type of packages are there, how are we gonna support them after we provide them, what does security look like? All of that were things that we discussed even before we even started looking at delivering them.

Right. And, and that's why I think what makes this partnership really special is because we understand that security. We talked about that earlier, you know, two, two components of customers, you know, critical needs are lessen the complexity and security.

So this was really a way that we did a lot of homework, a lot of back and forth. The prioritization of the, of the packages were even like slipping, you know, back and forth. As time went on, we just got, we even had more.

So I really have to say a big thank you to, uh, our engineering team at, at suse, and also the support from Amazon's Lennox team. It just really, um, it, it was really awesome to see everybody come together. It's, it's such a unique, a unique partnership.

Absolutely. You know, I, I want to focus in on the security aspect of it, though, at a time where software supply chain security is so critical. Yeah.

Unfortunately, you know, we have at the, the, the, the folks at CS a ated, the sbo mm-hmm. Uh, regulations and so forth. And, you know, whether or not we still see a lot of this coming out of the quasi-governmental CSA and mire and, and this and so forth, but software, supply chain security is, is a critical critical pack piece of this.

Mm-hmm. And a critical part of this announcement is that Susa is certifying the security SSA's standing behind these packages saying, Hey, the packages you're getting from us, they don't have Shoh lt. Mm-hmm.

Or, or one of these, you know, worms that are out here now that are just wreaking havoc. Yeah, yeah. You know, with a lot of package managers out there.

Um, and, and that, you know, that's not trivial. Yeah. That's Really Important.

That was a truly essential part of this and driver is that, you know, when we look at our teams, you know, we can do that. We have the expertise, we Sure. You know, but the, you know, the value and the, the challenge of keeping up with is this package actively maintained?

Is anybody looking at it? Yep. Do we go fix it ourselves?

Do we then end up stuck, you know, maintaining something that we may not fully understand, but we identified a vulnerability. But if we're not, if we weren't careful, you know, we can very easily wake up and, and, um, tons of operational challenges and potentially really disappoint customers and that expectation. So being able to, to share that responsibility and shift it so that we can sleep at night and our customers can, because somebody is looking at a lot of the supply chain or not, uh, you know, as much on a best effort basis.

It's something that is core to this relationship. It's really important. You know, a, a word we've talked a lot about on these panels and in my videos these last couple days is scale.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. They call Amazon a hyperscaler.

Mm-hmm. It's, it's just that Spencer, it's the scale. It's not a dozen packages that I could keep an eye on.

Yeah. It's thousand thousand, 8,000, 3000 are going in to maintain. And, and you know, how maintaining any software, let alone open source is Right.

Uh, I found a bug in this week. I update it. I don't want to have to go through my, uh, j uh, you know, the, the, the last big one and find wherever it's running in my, in my infrastructure.

It is not at doing that at scale. Again, if it's not someone's job, it doesn't get done Well. The other, the other piece to this is that, you know, SUSE does have the open build system, and that's where we actually, uh, hard and insecure are, are the packages, right?

Yeah. And that is actually open to other, uh, companies that, that use it, you know, other open source Linux companies that use it. And so we, we are behind that, and we actually use that to deliver, um, the packages Love it.

And there's another, uh, deeper layer to this. And when, when we talk about packages, it's not like, okay, there's one package and that's it. There's always like a ton of dependencies around those packages.

So identifying those dependencies, making sure that those packages are there. So that also is a part of this entire package. It's all right.

Yeah. So there is a complexity there. Um, and yeah, S bombs aren't easy.

This was definitely complex. It's like the commercial and so on and so on and so on. Mm-hmm.

Once you start getting into these dependencies, well, I got this from here. They got it from there, and what are they doing? Yeah.

Yeah. And, and the one thing I would add is in the reality is all of us, uh, have challenges of keeping up with the amount of kernel cvs these days with the, the changes that were made and mm-hmm. And, you know, I, I think when we look at what that is going to take to ensure we're staying on top of it, a lot of it's a choice of where do you, you know, invest and Absolutely, we're running a little low on time.

I want to bring it down to a call to action. Mm-hmm. I always like to have a call to action in these things.

Let's number one, uh, Amazon Linux 2023 is available now. You don't have to wait till June to No, it'd be silly to wait till June to make that migration, number one. Number two, the S pals are available now.

Yes. How many, how many packages have we delivered? Now there's Question 800, 2,800 actually that from end of August, Right?

To to mid-November. November. Yeah.

That's a, I mean, that's how fast we been Operate. That's, we still landing more mm-hmm. For my Amazon using folks, and there's a lot of them out here.

Mm-hmm. How, how do they access this? We, Yep.

Absolutely. So, uh, customers who are using a L 2023 can actually, um, install and enable this SAL repository by a simple DNF command. Um, just install the repository and then you can install the packages that matter to you.

You don't have to install all the 1800 packages. You can just install the packages that matter to you. Even that happens with a simple DNF command.

So it's very easy. It's just two commands that you can use to access the repository and install the packages. Fantastic.

Do you think we'll see a time where we'll have sort of like a recommended configuration for AL 20 20, 20 23 with the al, or it's always sort of a la carte? I, I would take a stab that it's, you know, first it's gonna come down to is it something customers want? Yeah.

We maintain various, uh, uh, amies that we build for different architectures, different. So there's a number of amies, uh, Amazon machine images that we build, uh, with Amazon Linux. So if it is something that customers want, then yes.

But the reality is that it's, it's not terribly difficult. And for many customers, it becomes really tricky to try to guess what that set would be, and then for them to understand and how does that change? Right.

If I have another update, maybe a package goes away, what does that mean? Right. And so we may, but I, I think really for now, it's, it's understanding how customers are actually using it, monitoring what packages, not on an individual level, but an aggregate are really being used heavily so we can make sure that, you know, I'm missing anything.

We wanna really make sure customers are unblocked first. Maybe we'll make that easier later, but it's not a terrible, you know, inconvenience or issue today for customers to enable it, install a package, and if they want to create a, an, an omni of their own that already has that running and they're done. Right.

So it's probably good stuff. The simple way to go. Absolutely.

Well re, Spencer Christine, thank you so much for coming on here, tech Trunk TV with us today. I'm sure our audience appreciates it. Great work.

Great work. I mean, look, maintaining, how was it? 8,000 packages Uhhuh?

Totally, yeah. Maintaining 8,000 packages and, and then having an enterprise, a true enterprise Linux. Yeah.

I mean, the folks that at, uh, have been doing it for over two decades. Mm-hmm. It's not a trivial task.

Right. Yeah. It takes a village.

Yeah. And, um, continued success, success with it. We, we will see it.

I'm sure we'll see more of it coming and, uh, we'll, we'll be following up. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for watching.

Uh, we'll be back. I think this may wrap our day two coverage up, but we, we have a full day more of, of Amazon coverage of AWS reinvent coverage tomorrow, uh, starting with our Textron gang first thing in the morning. Well, first thing in the morning, Vegas time.

It might be a little later for you guys out there on the East Coast. But for now, this is Alan Schell. Thanks for staying with us today.

Have a great day. You've just watched Textron tv.