Migrating an EC2 Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from Amazon Linux 2 to the latest Amazon Linux version 2023

Question

Hello everyone

I have issues with an existing Amazon Linux 2 AMI, cannot install node version 18 or above. I get the following error.

node: /lib64/libm.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.27' not found (required by node)
node: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.28' not found (required by node)

What are the recommended steps for migrating an EC2 Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from Amazon Linux 2 to the latest Amazon Linux version 2023 (as of 2023)? Additionally, how can I successfully transition from init.d to systemd during this migration process?

Thanks in advance.

Answer

Hello.

It is not possible to directly upgrade from Amazon Linux 2 to Amazon Linux 2023, so basically you need to migrate by building Amazon Linux 2023 from scratch.  
For example, it is necessary to identify the middleware that is currently installed on Amazon Linux 2 and evaluate whether it can be used on Amazon Linux 2023.  
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2023/ug/compare-with-al2.html

Amazon Linux2 should also basically be using Systemd, but is there anything that uses init.d?  
It might be a good idea to migrate from init.d files to Systemd files one by one.

Migrating an EC2 Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from Amazon Linux 2 to the latest Amazon Linux version 2023

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