The article is misleading, it speaks about ditching the OS level, however AWS doesn't care about the OS, they only care about the hypervisor use to run these OS'es, and want to remain open to hosting a large (and growing) number of OSes.
Linux alone is still not an hypervisor. Windows now has its own hypervisor, Hyper-V (still optional but more often required if you intend to use some of its features, but Microsoft partnered with Amazon and Google and a few others so that hypervisors other than Hyper-V could be used as an alternative).
On Linux, there are no hypervisor at the kernel level (remember that Linux fundamentally is just the kernel, not its many environments and distributions). But Linux offers some services in the kernel (most of them inside optional drivers) to allow running several hypervisors with good performance (for now it supports well Xen, or VirtualBox, or Hyper-V with some limitations on the Windows guest, a few other will come; and I'm quite sure that Amazon won't kill this Linux kernel capability, it may just add a few other drivers for impoved performance, management or security)
Then AWS can choopse whatever they want for their very large AWS hypervisor. It will still support various VMs running Linux, Windows, Android, or specific VMs tuned for several containers, or for lightweights "functions" or "no-code" and "low-code" solutions (most of them not running VMs or multiple processes or threads, but very thin "fibers" that you can install and instanciate in a few microseconds and that can stay "dormant" for extended periods of time, and costing almost nothing and that can be hosted anywhere dynamically: a perfect choice for Amazon in AWS or Microsoft in Azure, or Google as well, as this will also be very cost-effective and attractive for many more customers than those they currently have).
So what is the problem? Linux support for hypervisors is still not enough integrated and there's a lack of common base that can be used with all hypervisors for all types of deployments (soft or hard, at VM, or containers of threads like Kubernates, or fibers for functions and many event-driven web apps and RESTAPI services).
Microsoft is working on this, so does Amazon, nothing bad. But Linux.org still lays a bit behind and still focuses a standalone full VM with its kernel which is still not easily extensible for modern architectures and deployment needs: full VMs are not the best option for everyone, it's fine for small servers managed and owned by a single person or a small team.
Linux is definitely not dead, it effectively scales on many more different architectures (as long as the universal worlwide cloud is not involved). We still lack a web-centered OS, whereas Linux/Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android are still host-centered, jsut like most databases and storages): OSes must be able to rethink what is an "app"? Is is still necessarily a "process"? Should web services replace apps, and instead of managing resources by host, they should manage user environments from any access point, using arbitrary computing resources deployed on demand and running virtually nowhere precisely but only inside a environment centered on individual identities owned by users and hosted anywhere and accessbiel from anywhere?
But for now we still need an OS on at least one device, we still live in a binary world of the client/server split. We need more tiers, and refocus on users (and the capability offered to users to create as many identities as they want and isolate them when inteacting with other "identities" on the web (this would be great for user's privacy). but for that we still lack a real "network OS" (where everything is virtualized, and the only "host" is the Internet as a whole.
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The article is misleading, it speaks about ditching the OS level, however AWS doesn't care about the OS, they only care about the hypervisor use to run these OS'es, and want to remain open to hosting a large (and growing) number of OSes.
Linux alone is still not an hypervisor. Windows now has its own hypervisor, Hyper-V (still optional but more often required if you intend to use some of its features, but Microsoft partnered with Amazon and Google and a few others so that hypervisors other than Hyper-V could be used as an alternative).
On Linux, there are no hypervisor at the kernel level (remember that Linux fundamentally is just the kernel, not its many environments and distributions). But Linux offers some services in the kernel (most of them inside optional drivers) to allow running several hypervisors with good performance (for now it supports well Xen, or VirtualBox, or Hyper-V with some limitations on the Windows guest, a few other will come; and I'm quite sure that Amazon won't kill this Linux kernel capability, it may just add a few other drivers for impoved performance, management or security)
Then AWS can choopse whatever they want for their very large AWS hypervisor. It will still support various VMs running Linux, Windows, Android, or specific VMs tuned for several containers, or for lightweights "functions" or "no-code" and "low-code" solutions (most of them not running VMs or multiple processes or threads, but very thin "fibers" that you can install and instanciate in a few microseconds and that can stay "dormant" for extended periods of time, and costing almost nothing and that can be hosted anywhere dynamically: a perfect choice for Amazon in AWS or Microsoft in Azure, or Google as well, as this will also be very cost-effective and attractive for many more customers than those they currently have).
So what is the problem? Linux support for hypervisors is still not enough integrated and there's a lack of common base that can be used with all hypervisors for all types of deployments (soft or hard, at VM, or containers of threads like Kubernates, or fibers for functions and many event-driven web apps and RESTAPI services).
Microsoft is working on this, so does Amazon, nothing bad. But Linux.org still lays a bit behind and still focuses a standalone full VM with its kernel which is still not easily extensible for modern architectures and deployment needs: full VMs are not the best option for everyone, it's fine for small servers managed and owned by a single person or a small team.
Linux is definitely not dead, it effectively scales on many more different architectures (as long as the universal worlwide cloud is not involved). We still lack a web-centered OS, whereas Linux/Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android are still host-centered, jsut like most databases and storages): OSes must be able to rethink what is an "app"? Is is still necessarily a "process"? Should web services replace apps, and instead of managing resources by host, they should manage user environments from any access point, using arbitrary computing resources deployed on demand and running virtually nowhere precisely but only inside a environment centered on individual identities owned by users and hosted anywhere and accessbiel from anywhere?
But for now we still need an OS on at least one device, we still live in a binary world of the client/server split. We need more tiers, and refocus on users (and the capability offered to users to create as many identities as they want and isolate them when inteacting with other "identities" on the web (this would be great for user's privacy). but for that we still lack a real "network OS" (where everything is virtualized, and the only "host" is the Internet as a whole.