Posted On: Jun 30, 2023
Amazon GameLift now supports Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023), a new Linux-based operating system for AWS that is designed to provide a secure, stable, high-performance environment to develop and run your cloud applications. Amazon GameLift is a fully managed service that allows you to manage and scale dedicated game servers for multiplayer games. With this release, Amazon GameLift now supports new game servers that run on Windows 2016, Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) and AL2023.
AL2023 is the third generation of our Amazon Linux distribution and offers several improvements over 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 the availability of kernel 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. AL2023 also improves the development experience for customers building on Unreal Engine 5 by natively supporting updates to the core tool chain packages, including glibc.
Amazon Linux 2023 is available in all supported Amazon GameLift regions, except AWS China Regions. To learn more about Amazon GameLift support of AL2023, see the release notes.