Update on Amazon Linux AMI end-of-life

Published: 2020-01-27 | Originally published at AWS Blog

Update Jan 2, 2024 – The Amazon Linux AMI (also called Amazon Linux 1) reached its end of life on December 31, 2023. Amazon Linux AMI will no longer receive any security updates or bug fixes. We encourage customers to upgrade their applications to use Amazon Linux 2023, which includes long term support through 2028.

Update Jan 4, 2021 – The Amazon Linux AMI ended its standard support on December 31, 2020 and has entered a maintenance support phase. A list of supported and unsupported packages along with additional information is now available here .

Launched in September 2010 , the Amazon Linux AMI has helped numerous customers build Linux-based applications on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) . In order to bring them even more security, stability, and productivity, we introduced Amazon Linux 2 in 2017 . Adding many modern features, Amazon Linux 2 is backed by long-term support, and we strongly encourage you to use it for your new applications.

As stated in the FAQ , we documented that the last version of the Amazon Linux AMI (2018.03) would be end-of-life on June 30, 2020. Based on customer feedback, we are extending the end-of-life date, and we’re also announcing a maintenance support period.

End-of-life Extension
The end-of-life for Amazon Linux AMI is now extended to December 31, 2020: until then, we will continue to provide security updates and refreshed versions of packages as needed.

Maintenance Support
Update Feb 19, 2021 – Beginning January 1, 2021, the Amazon Linux AMI entered a new maintenance support period that extends to December 31, 2023.

During this maintenance support period:

• The Amazon Linux AMI will only receive critical and important security updates for a reduced set of packages.
• It will no longer be guaranteed to support new EC2 platform capabilities, or new AWS features.

Supported packages will include:

• The Linux kernel,
• Low-level system libraries such as glibc and openssl,
• Popular packages that are still in a supported state in their upstream sources, such as MySQL and PHP.

A detailed list of supported and unsupported packages along with additional information is available here .

Questions?
If you need assistance or have feedback, please reach out to your usual AWS support contacts, or post a message in the AWS Forum for Amazon Linux . Thank you for using Amazon Linux AMI !

About the Author

Julien is the Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Evangelist for EMEA . He focuses on helping developers and enterprises bring their ideas to life. In his spare time, he reads the works of JRR Tolkien again and again.