Amazon Linux AMI 2017.09 Release Notes

The Kernel has been updated to latest 4.9.y stable tree, new ENA driver 1.3.0 as well as support for TCP Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT (BBR) which improve network performance.

BBR is not enabled by default. You can enable it on your EC2 Instance via:

$ sudo modprobe tcp_bbr

$ sudo modprobe sch_fq

$ sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control=bbr

Persistent configuration should look like:

$ sudo su -

# cat <<EOF>> /etc/sysconfig/modules/tcpcong.modules  

>#!/bin/bash

> exec /sbin/modprobe tcp_bbr >/dev/null 2>&1

> exec /sbin/modprobe sch_fq >/dev/null 2>&1

> EOF

# chmod 755 /etc/sysconfig/modules/tcpcong.modules

# echo "net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control = bbr" >> /etc/sysctl.d/00-tcpcong.conf

 

SSM Agent is now installed by default in the base Amazon Linux AMI. The SSM Agent allows you to use RunCommand in order to configure and run scripts on your EC2 Instances. See Amazon EC2 Systems Manager documentation for more details.

Many of our packages have been re-synced to newer upstream versions.

Postgres 9.6, Ruby 2.4, Python 3.6, Mysql 5.7, Tomcat 8.5, Nginx 1.12.1, Squid 3.5, OpenMPI 2.1, GCC 6.4

Python 3.6, 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 3.6 and the associated pip and virtualenv packages can be installed via sudo yum install python36 python36-virtualenv python36-pip.

We've also added the latest in the Ruby 2.x series, Ruby 2.4, to the package repositories. You can install this new Ruby package with sudo yum install ruby24.

The Amazon Linux AMI now uses OpenSSL 1.0.2k. As a result of this improvement, we are happy to announce a much-requested feature: The HTTP/2 protocol is now supported by our httpd24, nginx, and curl packages.

We've integrated newer versions of some of our database offerings into the Amazon Linux AMI repositories: Postgres 9.6 and MySQL 5.7 are now available and can be installed via sudo yum install postgresql96 and sudo yum install mysql57 respectively.

Many customers have asked for an updated Squid package. Squid 3.5 is now available in the package repositories.

The Amazon Linux AMI 2017.09 repositories include the Nginx 1.12 release. You can install or upgrade to the latest version with sudo yum install nginx.

We've upgraded our Tomcat 8 package to provide Tomcat 8.5. Tomcat 8.5 provides a replacement for Tomcat 8 which has pulled forward many new features from Tomcat 9.0. You can install or upgrade to Tomcat 8.5 with sudo yum install tomcat8.

We've added GCC 6.4 to the Amazon Linux 2017.09 package repositories. This package can be installed alongside our existing GCC packages via sudo yum install gcc64.

In order to better support HPC workloads, we've updated our OpenMPI package from version 1.6.4 to OpenMPI 2.1.1. As part of this update, we are also providing OpenMPI 1.6.4 compatibility packages in order to allow you to continue building and running your existing OpenMPI applications.

Since we've moved from tomcat 8 to tomcat 8.5, there may be a few minor backwards incompatibilities.

We'd like to remind you about our SNS topic which can keep you informed of our regular Amazon Linux AMI releases. To begin receiving notifications about our new AMI releases, please subscribe from the us-east-1 region to our SNS topic:

arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:137112412989:amazon-linux-ami-updates