Now Available – Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09

My colleague Sean Kelly is part of the team that produces the Amazon Linux AMI. He shared the guest post below in order to introduce you to the newest version!

— 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 2016.09 Today
Today we launching the 2016.09 Amazon Linux AMI, which is supported in all regions and on all current-generation EC2 instance types. The Amazon Linux AMI supports both HVM and PV modes, 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 Features
The Amazon Linux AMI’s roadmap is driven in large part by customer requests. We’ve added a number of features in this release in response to these requests and to keep our existing feature set up-to-date:

Nginx 1.10 – Based on numerous customer requests, the Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09 repositories include the latest stable Nginx 1.10 release. You can install or upgrade to the latest version with sudo yum install nginx.

PostgreSQL 9.5 – Many customers have asked for PostgreSQL 9.5, and it is now available as a separate package from our other PostgreSQL offerings. PostgreSQL 9.5 is available via sudo yum install postgresql95.

Python 3.5 – Python 3.5, the latest in the Python 3.x series, has been integrated with our existing Python experience and is now available in the Amazon Linux AMI repositories. This includes the associated virtualenv and pip packages, which can be used to install and manage dependencies. The default python version for /usr/bin/python can be managed via alternatives, just like our existing Python packages. Python 3.5 and the associated pip and virtualenv packages can be installed via sudo yum install python35 python35-virtualenv python35-pip.

Amazon SSM Agent – The Amazon SSM Agent allows you to use Run Command in order to configure and run scripts on your EC2 instances and is now available in the Amazon Linux 2016.09 repositories (read Remotely Manage Your Instances to learn more). Install the agent by running sudo yum install amazon-ssm-agent and start it with sudo /sbin/start amazon-ssm-agent.

Learn More
To learn more about all of the new features of the new Amazon Linux AMI, take a look at the release notes.

— Sean Kelly, Amazon Linux AMI Team

PS – If you would like to work on future versions of the Amazon Linux AMI, check out our Linux jobs!