About time!
It does seem strange that a developer workbench system wasn't one of the first VM's Amazon (and other cloud vendors) created and offered...
Amazon Web Services has added a Linux option to its “WorkSpaces” desktop-as-a-service and pitched the offering as a fine way to develop apps for its own EC2 infrastructure-as-a-service. The new desktops run Amazon Linux 2 and includes Firefox, the Evolution email and calendar app, Pidgin for chat and Libre Office for getting …
That Amazon Linux 2 LTS release seems to have happened very quietly - they've apparently removed mentions of 'release candidate' from most of the relevant pages but I can't find any press release or blog post - anyone found something announcing this?
The v2 LTS release is more interesting (to me, at least) than v1 as they're providing externally hostable VM images (e.g. KVM, which can be easily adapted for OpenStack) so it's a tiny bit less locked-in to AWS. A tiny bit.