Amazon Linux AMI

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 also includes packages that enable easy integration with AWS, including launch configuration tools and many popular AWS libraries and tools.

Yes, the Amazon Linux AMI is supported through subscriptions to AWS Support. More details can be found on the AWS Support page.

The Amazon Linux AMI (also called Amazon Linux 1) reached its end of life on December 31, 2023. Amazon Linux AMI will not receive any security updates or bug fixes starting January 1, 2024.

Modify /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo. Under the section marked [epel], change enabled=0 to enabled=1. To temporarily enable the EPEL 6 repository, use the yum command line option --enablerepo=epel.

To lock your AMI to a specific version, edit /etc/yum.conf. Comment out the line that reads releasever=latest and run yum clean all to clear the cache. Alternatively, you can launch a new instance with the following user data passed to cloud-init: #cloud-config repo_releasever: 2015.09

To disable the security update on boot, you can use the following user-data: #cloud-config repo_upgrade: none. This can be entered as text or uploaded as a file in the Advanced Instance Options page in the Request Instances Wizard.

The Amazon Linux AMI uses the UTF-8 character encoding by default. Client terminals not using the UTF-8 encoding will not always translate UTF-8 characters correctly. To fix this, set your client terminal encoding to UTF-8.

The report_instanceid=yes setting allows the Amazon Linux AMI repositories to log the instance ID (i-xxxxxxxx) and region (e.g., us-west-2) of an instance downloading a package. This enables the Amazon Linux AMI team to provide more focused and specific customer support to individual instances.