Now Available – Amazon Linux AMI 2017.09

I’m happy to announce that the latest version of the Amazon Linux AMI (2017.09) is now available in all AWS Regions for all current-generation EC2 instances. The AMI contains a supported and maintained Linux image that is designed to provide a stable, secure, high performance environment for applications running on EC2.

Easy Upgrade
You can upgrade your existing instances by running two commands and then rebooting:

$ sudo yum clean all
$ sudo yum update

Lots of Goodies
The AMI contains many new features, many of which were added in response to requests from our customers. Here’s a summary:

Kernel 4.9.51 – Based on the 4.9 stable kernel series, this kernel includes the ENA 1.3.0 driver along with support for TCP Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT (BBR). Read my post, Elastic Network Adapter – High-Performance Network Interface for Amazon EC2 to learn more about ENA. Read the Release Notes to learn how to enable BBR.

Amazon SSM Agent – The Amazon SSM Agent is now installed by default. This means that you can now use EC2 Run Command to configure and run scripts on your instances with no further setup. To learn more, read Executing Commands Using Systems Manager Run Command or Manage Instances at Scale Without SSH Access Using EC2 Run Command.

Python 3.6 – The newest version of Python is now included and can be managed via virtualenv and alternatives. You can install Python 3.6 like this:

$ sudo yum install python36 python36-virtualenv python36-pip

Ruby 2.4 – The latest version of Ruby in the 2.4 series is now available. Install it like this:

$ sudo yum install ruby24

OpenSSL – The AMI now uses OpenSSL 1.0.2k.

HTTP/2 – The HTTP/2 protocol is now supported by the AMI’s httpd24, nginx, and curl packages.

Relational Databases – Postgres 9.6 and MySQL 5.7 are now available, and can be installed like this:

$ sudo yum install postgresql96
$ sudo yum install mysql57

OpenMPI – The OpenMPI package has been upgraded from 1.6.4 to 2.1.1. OpenMPI compatibility packages are available and can be used to build and run older OpenMPI applications.

And More – Other updated packages include Squid 3.5, Nginx 1.12, Tomcat 8.5, and GCC 6.4.

Launch it Today
You can use this AMI to launch EC2 instances in all AWS Regions today. It is available for EBS-backed and Instance Store-backed instances and supports HVM and PV modes.

— Jeff;