Now Available – Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09

Amazon Linux 2016 AMI is now available!

This content was taken from the official AWS Blog but since you’re already here, might as well enjoy yourself and if you can think of something you’re thankful for in 5 seconds or less, go ahead and help my site stay up by clicking on an ad. If you don’t, there’ll be even more!

The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It is designed to provide a stable, secure, and high performance execution environment for applications running on Amazon EC2. It supports the latest EC2 instance type features and includes packages that enable easy integration with AWS. Amazon Web Services provides ongoing security and maintenance updates to all instances running the Amazon Linux AMI. The Amazon Linux AMI is provided at no additional charge to Amazon EC2 users.

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 (9/27/2016)
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:

Kernel 4.4.19

This release of the Amazon Linux AMI includes kernel 4.4.19, including a newly updated ENA driver 1.0.2.

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.

PHP 7.0
Based on customer requests, PHP 7.0 has been added to the Amazon Linux AMI repositories and is now available to be used alongside our existing PHP ecosystem. PHP 7.0 can be installed via sudo yum install php70. PHP 7.0 is able to be installed in parallel with PHP 5.5 and PHP 5.6, and the version in use is controlled by alternatives. It is important to note that PHP 5.5 and PHP 5.6 have higher alternatives priority. If you have PHP 7.0 installed in parallel to other version, 5.5 and 5.6 will take precedence as the default.

If you want to ensure your environment will use PHP 7.0 even after installing PHP 5.5 or 5.6, run sudo alternatives --set php /usr/bin/php-7.0 or run sudo alternatives --config php to set the default interactively.

PHP 7.0 maintains its own configuration files separate from the other system PHP versions, so changes made to PHP 7.0 will not be applied to either of PHP 5.5 or PHP 5.6 (and vice versa).

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.

Boot Time Performance
We’ve made a variety of changes for this release to improve the boot performance of the Amazon Linux AMI. There is about a 20% improvement in launch time on average from 2016.03.0 to this release, 2016.09.0. We aim to continue to provide a performant instance boot experience with future Amazon Linux AMI releases.

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! (Tell them I referred you so I get the bonus!)

Brought to you by

Jeff Barr ( @jeffbarr)