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Amazon Linux vs MariaDB on CentOS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Linux
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
16th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
MariaDB on CentOS
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
30th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

SAURAB K GANGURDE - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior AWS Consultant at Quantum Integrators
“Amazon Linux delivers automated security updates— including live kernel patching in AL2023—ensuring protected workloads with minimal manual effort and zero-downtime patching.”
One improvement for Amazon Linux would be stronger support for running it outside AWS. Although Amazon provides local VM images for VirtualBox and VMware, they are intended mainly for development and testing. Unlike Ubuntu, Debian, or Red Hat, Amazon Linux is not designed or fully supported as a production OS in on-prem or hybrid environments. Expanding official support outside AWS would offer more flexibility for teams that maintain mixed infrastructure. Another area for improvement is the community ecosystem. Compared to Ubuntu or Red Hat, Amazon Linux has a smaller community and fewer third-party resources or tutorials. A larger ecosystem would make troubleshooting and adoption easier. Finally, improving backward compatibility between Amazon Linux 2 and Amazon Linux 2023—especially around package management (DNF vs yum) and updated toolchains—would simplify upgrades for teams managing large fleets.
YK
Senior Software Developer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Reliable relational database has handled heavy payment traffic and has improved query speed
The best features MariaDB on CentOS offers is that it is a default database, so we can easily install it. It was a seamless installation out of the box. The other thing which we need and which MariaDB provides is the speed. For pooling and handling multiple connections on a single instance, MySQL and some other services provide their enterprise edition that we need to pay for. However, for MariaDB on CentOS, it is freely available and built-in. With respect to that, it is all seamless. We do not need to pay for anything, and we are utilizing the best connection pooling capability. We also got some performance speeds over our queries. It is also very much compatible. It is all the same as MySQL. It fully supports MySQL. It is already compatible with our previous projects, and if we introduce some new kind of thing, it can handle everything. MariaDB on CentOS has positively impacted our organization because we were on a different relational database and that was not holding that much connection and that much speed. After implementing MariaDB, it gives us so much ease to handle those issues. It has things inside it so we do not even need to change the configuration; it handles it with very ease. The replication thing is very good, and we have fewer read replicas because of the connection handling. The reader latency is very less. We do not get any idea that the data we are fetching from a master to a slave instance is different because the reader latency is very less. The primary thing that we got from MariaDB on CentOS is the connection handling capability. The connection was dropping, so that is totally resolved. We did not even find any single instance of this type of case after implementing MariaDB. The second thing is the speed. Sometimes it performs faster. When we do EXPLAIN and everything, it shows us what indexing it has been using, and they are much more efficient than the other relational database. It handles everything in a good way. It is a balanced configuration. By default, it provides a balanced configuration, so we do not need to look into that side. The faster query speed and the better replication feature that is open source, and we also have community support for that. The security updates are very fast. It also supports storage engines for different types of data we can simply use. One of the things that is not ideal is that the version which is default is sometimes older than the very latest.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Whenever I deploy solutions on Amazon Linux, I almost never have to worry about the operating system."
"Amazon Linux helps us do that, and the performance is so high on these servers."
"From my personal and system perspective, I have experienced over the last one year that any packages run easily in Amazon Linux, which I would recommend because I am a cloud engineer for AWS cloud for the last six plus years and I am aware of how these things are involved."
"Being able to ship services to our customers efficiently and ensuring service reliability is a key benefit delivered by Amazon Linux."
"Amazon Linux offers many excellent features, is quicker and faster than CentOS, Ubuntu, or similar alternatives, natively supports many AWS features with long-term support and regular security updates, and its clear, superior documentation along with broad support for dependency and open-source software makes it an excellent operating system for efficiently setting up and upgrading complex, self-hosted environments."
"With respect to scalability, security, and reliability, these services help me significantly."
"Amazon Linux has positively impacted our organization in a couple of ways."
"The main positive impact of Amazon Linux on my company has been no interruptions of services, and the public website is up and running, which allows us to monetize with virtually no staff hours for downtime or service interruptions."
"MariaDB on CentOS has positively impacted our organization in several ways."
"MariaDB on CentOS has positively impacted my organization by providing more features compared to Oracle MySQL, particularly in terms of performance, advantages, and implemented features, leading to migrations from Oracle MySQL to MariaDB on CentOS."
"MariaDB on CentOS is faster than Oracle."
 

Cons

"I choose nine out of ten because it could use a bit more options."
"Amazon Linux can be improved by having the documentation contain more examples of use cases."
"I have honestly never had any problems with Amazon Linux, aside from disk space issues."
"I rate Amazon Linux a nine out of ten. I choose this rating because I am concerned about the repository possibly containing vulnerability packages, though this could happen with any system."
"While Amazon Linux worked very well overall for us, there could be a few areas for improvement."
"For the improvement of Amazon Linux, I think there should be UI features in the future, as Amazon Linux currently has only terminal capabilities without a UI, and I hope to see documentation updates as soon as possible so when documentation expires, I am updating it and referring to it soon."
"With the support system for Amazon Linux, I feel there is a lack compared to Red Hat, which provides a stronger support system."
"Compared to Ubuntu and other Linux distributions, Amazon Linux has worse support, which often leads us to rely heavily on documentation."
"Many functionalities are not available in MariaDB on CentOS, so those aspects needed to be rewritten, particularly Oracle proprietary features."
"I think MariaDB on CentOS needs improvements in some memory-level implementations within the operating system, as I have noticed issues related to memory orientation, such as out-of-memory problems."
"One of the things that is not ideal is that the version which is default is sometimes older than the very latest."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
15%
Government
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise14
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Amazon Linux?
Right now, I don't think there are any specific areas to improve in Amazon Linux.
What is your primary use case for Amazon Linux?
The use cases for this in our company is that we have a customer that internally uses it for several applications, and they are a telecommunications company that has virtual machines and Linux mach...
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon Linux?
I use AWS, Azure, and I'm starting to use GCP, Google Cloud Platform. I have also used ZoomInfo. I have been using the product since its creation. I have not used the ZoomInfo product. With Amazon,...
What is your primary use case for MariaDB on CentOS?
My main use case for MariaDB on CentOS in my last organization was in the telecom domain, where clients mainly focused on the database called MariaDB, for which we set up on-premises servers runnin...
What advice do you have for others considering MariaDB on CentOS?
I can share that after switching to MariaDB on CentOS, we saw great advantages in terms of high availability performance, particularly compared to other operating systems such as Linux and Unix pla...
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Linux vs. MariaDB on CentOS and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.