Today, we are announcing general availability of Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). AL2023 is the next generation of Amazon Linux from Amazon Web Services and is designed to provide a secure, stable, high-performance environment to develop and run your cloud applications. EKS customers can enjoy the benefits of AL2023 by using the standard AL2023-based EKS optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with Managed Node Groups, self-managed nodes, and Karpenter.

AL2023 offers several improvements over Amazon Linux 2 (AL2). For example, AL2023 takes a secure-by-default approach to help improve your security posture with preconfigured security policies, SELinux in permissive mode and IMDSv2 enabled by default. AL2023 also optimizes boot time to reduce the time from instance launch to running applications. These optimizations span the Amazon Linux kernel and beyond. For a full comparison, see Comparing Amazon Linux 2 and Amazon Linux 2023.

The standard Amazon Linux 2023-based EKS optimized AMI is generally available in all AWS Regions including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and China across all supported EKS versions including EKS versions 1.23 and 1.24 in extended support. To learn more about using Amazon Linux 2023 with EKS, see Amazon EKS optimized Amazon Linux AMIs.ENnbsp;