Launched in September 2010, the Amazon Linux AMI has helped numerous customers build Linux-based applications on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In order to bring them even more security, stability, and productivity, we introduced Amazon Linux 2 in 2017. Adding many modern features, Amazon Linux 2 is backed by long-term support, and we strongly encourage you to use it for your new applications.

As stated in the FAQ, we documented that the last version of the Amazon Linux AMI (2018.03) would be end-of-life on June 30, 2020. Based on customer feedback, we are extending the end-of-life date, and we’re also announcing a maintenance support period.

End-of-life Extension

The end-of-life for Amazon Linux AMI is now extended to December 31, 2020: until then, we will continue to provide security updates and refreshed versions of packages as needed.

Maintenance Support

Beyond December 31, 2020, the Amazon Linux AMI will enter a new maintenance support period that extends to June 30, 2023.

During this maintenance support period:

The Amazon Linux AMI will only receive critical and important security updates for a reduced set of packages.

It will no longer be guaranteed to support new EC2 platform capabilities, or new AWS features.

Supported packages will include:

The Linux kernel,

Low-level system libraries such as glibc and openssl,

Popular packages that are still in a supported state in their upstream sources, such as MySQL and PHP.

We will provide a detailed list of supported and unsupported packages in future posts.

Questions?

If you need assistance or have feedback, please reach out to your usual AWS support contacts, or post a message in the AWS Forum for Amazon Linux. Thank you for using Amazon Linux AMI!