Announcement - Amazon GameLift Adds Support for Amazon Linux 2023

Amazon GameLift now supports Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023), a new Linux-based operating system for AWS that is designed to provide a secure, stable, high-performance environment to develop and run your cloud applications. With this release, Amazon GameLift now supports game servers that run on Windows 2016, Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) and AL2023.

AL2023 is the third generation of our Amazon Linux distribution and offers several improvements over AL2. For example, AL2023 takes a security-by-default approach to help improve your security posture with pre-configured security policies, SELinux in permissive mode and IMDSv2 enabled by default, and the availability of kernel live patching. With deterministic upgrades through versioned repositories, you can lock to a specific version of the Amazon Linux package repository, giving you control over how and when you absorb updates. With this capability, you can adhere to operational best practices more efficiently by ensuring consistency between package versions and updates across your environment. For a full comparison, see Comparing Amazon Linux 2 and Amazon Linux 2023. AL2023 also improves the development experience for customers building on Unreal Engine 5 by natively supporting updates to the core tool chain packages, including glibc.

If you have active Amazon GameLift fleets running on Amazon Linux (AL1) OS, we recommend you to migrate to the newer versions of the Amazon Linux as AL1 will be reaching end of support on December 31, 2023 after which it will no longer receive security patches and updates. For details on AL1 end of support and migrating guidelines refer to the Amazon GameLift AL1 FAQ page.In order to get started with creating fleets on AL2023, follow the developer guide.

For more information on AL2023 support, check out the Release Notes and the What's New post

Thank you,

Sachin Gupta, Amazon GameLift PM