AWS has opened a public preview of Amazon Linux 2027, built on Linux 7.1 with DNF5 as the package manager.

Where Amazon Linux came from and where it is going

Amazon Linux started as a CentOS derivative, which made sense when CentOS was a free rebuild of RHEL and AWS wanted a familiar base for EC2 instances.

Amazon Linux 2023 moved to a Fedora-derived base with its own release cadence, and 2027 continues that direction. The distribution now tracks Fedora upstream on a two-year cycle rather than shadowing RHEL, which gives AWS control over the release schedule and the package set without depending on Red Hat’s decisions.

DNF5 is the visible consequence for anyone administering these instances. It is the rewritten DNF, substantially faster than DNF4, particularly on dependency resolution, and it is what Fedora has been shipping since Fedora 41.

# DNF5 keeps the familiar interface
sudo dnf install nginx
sudo dnf upgrade

# but the internals are rewritten and it is noticeably quicker

If you write configuration management against Amazon Linux, the DNF5 command-line behaviour is close enough to DNF4 for most cases but not identical, and the output format has changed in ways that break scripts parsing it. That is the thing to test in the preview.

Why AWS maintains a distribution at all

It looks redundant given that every other distribution runs happily on EC2. The reasons are practical:

Integration. Instance metadata, CloudWatch agents, SSM, and the AWS CLI are preinstalled and preconfigured rather than added afterwards.

Boot time. Amazon Linux is tuned for fast boot on EC2, which matters for autoscaling where instance startup latency is a real cost.

Support alignment. One vendor for the operating system and the infrastructure, with a support contract that covers both.

Kernel tuning. Defaults are set for virtualised workloads on their own hypervisor, including their Nitro networking and storage.

Linux 7.1 as the base is reasonably current for an enterprise distribution, and considerably newer than what RHEL ships at equivalent points in its cycle.

For the preview

A public preview means available for testing and not for production. The package set will change, defaults will move, and there is no upgrade guarantee from preview to general availability.

Worth testing now if you run Amazon Linux at scale and have automation to validate, particularly the DNF5 migration. Worth ignoring until GA otherwise.

The broader pattern is worth noting: this is another large infrastructure operator reducing its dependence on the Red Hat ecosystem, in the same month that CERN committed to Debian for its accelerator controls. Different motivations, same direction.