Now Available – Amazon Linux AMI 2015.09

My colleague Max Spevack runs the team that produces the Amazon Linux AMI. He wrote the guest post below to announce the newest release!

— Jeff;

The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image for use on Amazon EC2.

We offer new major versions of the Amazon Linux AMI after a public testing phase that includes one or more Release Candidates. The Release Candidates are announced in the EC2 forum and we welcome feedback on them.

Launching 2015.09 Today
Today we announce the 2015.09 Amazon Linux AMI, which is supported in all regions and on all current-generation EC2 instance types.  The Amazon Linux AMI supports both PV and HVM mode, as well as both EBS-backed and Instance Store-backed AMIs.

You can launch this new version of the AMI in the usual ways. You can also upgrade an existing EC2 instance by running the following commands:

$ sudo yum clean all
$ sudo yum update

And then rebooting the instance.

New Kernel
A major new feature in this release is the 4.1.7 kernel, which is the most recent long-term stable release kernel. Of particular interest to many customers is the support for OverlayFS in the 4.x kernel series.

New Features
The roadmap for the Amazon Linux AMI is driven in large part by customer requests. During this release cycle, we have added a number of features as a result of these requests; here’s a sampling:

• Based on numerous customer requests and in order to support joining Amazon Linux AMI instances to an AWS Directory Service directory, we have added Samba 4.1 to the Amazon Linux AMI repositories, available via sudo yum install samba.
• Numerous customers have asked for PostgreSQL 9.4 and it is now available in our Amazon Linux AMI repositories as a separate package from PostgreSQL 9.2 and 9.3. PostgreSQL 9.4 is available via sudo yum install postgresql94 and the 2015.09 Amazon Linux AMI repositories include PostgreSQL 9.4.4.
• A frequent customer request has been MySQL 5.6, and we are pleased to offer it in the 2015.09 repositories as a separate package from MySQL 5.1 and 5.5. MySQL 5.6 is available via sudo yum install mysql56 and the 2015.09 Amazon Linux AMI repositories include MySQL 5.6.26.
• We introduced support for Docker and Go in our 2014.03 AMI, and we continue to follow upstream developments in each. The lead-up to the 2015.09 release included an update to Go 1.4 and to Docker 1.7.1.
• We already provide Python 2.6, 2.7 (default), and 3.4 in the Amazon Linux AMI, but several customers have also asked for the PyPy implementation of Python. We’re pleased to include PyPy 2.4 in our preview repository. PyPy 2.4 is compatible with Python 2.7.8 and is installable via sudo yum --enablerepo=amzn-preview install pypy.
• In our 2015.03 release we added an initial preview of the Rust programming language. Upstream development has continued on this language, and we have updated from Rust 1.0 to Rust 1.2 for the 2015.09 release. You can install the Rust compiler by running sudo yum --enablerepo=amzn-preview install rust.

The release notes contain a longer discussion of the new features and updated packages, including an updated version of Emacs prepared specially for Jeff in order to ensure timely publication of this blog post!

— Max Spevack, Development Manager, Amazon Linux AMI.

PS – If you enjoy the Amazon Linux AMI offering and would like to work on future versions, let us know!