Also, I'm not convinced Amazon (or Oracle for that matter) have a very bright future. The opaque development process and (lack of) community support make development pretty hard. I know from experience, getting bugs resolved (or just getting Amazon to care) is very hard. At the same time, even for a large corporate maintaining your own distro brings with it considerable costs.
Wouldn't it be great if instead they would work together, share some of the costs and profits of support and cloud mutually?!
Both Oracle and Amazon Linux have VERY bright futures for their use-cases.
Do you run Oracle? Want to know your distro will be supported 100%. Oracle Linux seems like a damn good bet to use.
Are you one of the largest companies on earth, who needs a distro to run your business? If so... guess what.. your distro is viable just on your own business.
Amazon offering Amazon Linux is just them showing some internal tech. Nothing more.
Last year many services on Azure went down because they all used Ubuntu and Ubuntu pushed an update that broke for a DNS configuration that Microsoft uses. Having your own distro won't guard you from fuck-ups of course, but you can imagine the difficult conversation Microsoft had to have with their biggest customers about how Canonical can take down your 40 billion dollar business globally?
But isn't the elephant in the room here Oracle Linux?!