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What is Linux?

Just like Windows and Mac OS X, Linux is an operating system. An operating system is software that manages all of the hardware resources associated with your desktop or laptop. To put it simply – the operating system manages the communication between your software and your hardware. Without the operating system (often referred to as the “OS”), the hardware wouldn’t function.

Who uses Linux?

You’re probably already using Linux, whether you know it or not. Depending on which user survey you look at, between one- and two-thirds of the webpages on the Internet are generated by servers running Linux.

Companies and individuals choose Linux for their servers because it is secure, and you can receive excellent support from a large community of users, in addition to companies like Canonical, SUSE, and Red Hat, which offer commercial support.

Many of the devices you own probably, such as Android phones, digital storage devices, personal video recorders, cameras, wearable's, and more, also run Linux. Even your car has Linux running under the hood.

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.