Today we are announcing the availability of Amazon Linux 2023 images for KVM and VMWare with the third quarterly update.

Starting today, customers can run Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) as a virtualized guest outside of directly being run on Amazon EC2. There are currently KVM (qcow2) and VMware (OVA) images available. These images for KVM and VMware hypervisor environments helps customers migrate their workloads to AL2023. This also allows customers to standardize on a single operating system across their on-prem and cloud environments.

AL2023.3 also introduces some new packages like libreswan, NodeJS20, and Boto3. Libreswan is an implementation of the Internet Key Exchange (IKE) protocol and is used to establish IPsec tunnels. It supports versions 1 and 2 of IKE, and is an update to the same IKE implementation previously shipped with AL2. NodeJS 20 is the latest LTS release of the NodeJS JavaScript runtime environment. Boto3 is the official AWS SDK for Python.ENnbsp;

To learn more about other features and capabilities in AL2023.3, see release notes.

Amazon Linux 2023 is generally available in all AWS Regions, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and the China Regions. To learn more about Amazon Linux 2023, see the AWS documentation.