Posted On: Mar 19, 2023
Today, we are announcing the general availability of Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023), our new Linux-based operating system for Amazon Web Services that is designed to provide a secure, stable, high-performance environment to develop and run your cloud applications. AL2023 provides seamless integration with various Amazon Web Services services and development tools and offers optimized performance for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Graviton-based instances and Amazon Web Services Support at no additional licensing cost. Starting with AL2023, a new Amazon Linux major release will be available every 2 years. This cadence provides you with a more predictable release cycle and up to 5 years of support, making it easier for you to plan your upgrades.
AL2023 offers several improvements over Amazon Linux 2 (AL2). For example, AL2023 takes a security-by-default approach to help improve your security posture with preconfigured security policies, SELinux in permissive mode and IMDSv2 enabled by default and live patching. With deterministic upgrades through versioned repositories, you can lock to a specific version of the Amazon Linux package repository, giving you control over how and when you absorb updates. With this capability, you can adhere to operational best practices more efficiently by ensuring consistency between package versions and updates across your environment. For a full comparison, see Comparing Amazon Linux 2 and Amazon Linux 2023.
Amazon Linux 2023 is generally available in all Amazon Web Services Regions, including the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. To learn more about Amazon Linux 2023, refer to the documentation.