Amazon Linux 2027 Outperforms Previous Version in AWS Cloud Benchmarks

AWS has announced the public preview of Amazon Linux 2027, its successor to the current Amazon Linux 2023 in-house distribution. Amazon Linux 2027 comes with significant upgrades, including a new default kernel, compiler leap, and other fundamental improvements.

The new version uses Linux 7.1 as its default kernel compared to Linux 6.18 on Amazon Linux 2023, and the compiler leap is from GCC 11.5 to GCC 16.1. Other key upgrades include moving from Python 3.9 to Python 3.14.

A benchmarking session was conducted by Phoronix, comparing Amazon Linux 2023 with Amazon Linux 2027 on an AMD EPYC 5th Gen 'Turin' processor using the general-purpose m8a.4xlarge instance in the AWS Cloud. The results showed that Amazon Linux 2027 offers nice performance gains over Amazon Linux 2023.