Posted On: Sep 13, 2023

We are excited to announce support for Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) on Amazon EMR on EKS. Customers can now use AL2023 as the operating system together with Java 17 as Java runtime to run Spark workloads on Amazon EMR on EKS. This provides customers a secure, stable, high-performance environment to develop and run their applications as well as enables them to access the latest enhancements such as kernel, toolchain, glibc, openssl and other system libraries and utilities.

Previously, customers could only run their Spark jobs on Amazon EMR on EKS with Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) as the operating system. Now, with this launch, Amazon EMR on EKS supports AL2023 as an operating system, which offers several improvements over AL2 such as supporting Python 3.9 by default, the GNU C Library (glibc) is upgraded to 2.34 in AL2023, GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) is upgraded to 11.3, and more. For a complete list of the difference between AL2 and AL2023, please visit AL2023 user guide.

To learn more about this feature, please visit our release documentation. Amazon Linux 2023 is supported on Amazon EMR on EKS release version 6.13 release and later, and available in all regions where Amazon EMR on EKS is currently available.