Amazon Linux 2027 Enters Public Preview as Amazon Linux 2 Reaches End of Support

On September 3, 2026, Amazon Web Services announced the public preview of Amazon Linux 2027 (AL2027), the next major version of the operating system that sits underneath a large share of the servers and containers running on AWS. The announcement arrived about two months after the previous generation, Amazon Linux 2, reached end of support on June 30, 2026.

If your company runs a web application or custom software on AWS, the operating system is probably something you have never had to think about. This is one of the few moments when it deserves a place on the agenda, because three Amazon Linux generations are now at three very different points in their life.

This article explains what AWS has actually released, what is still a preview, which dates are confirmed, and how a small or mid-sized business should plan around them.

What AWS announced on September 3, 2026

According to the AWS What's New post, Amazon Linux 2027 is available as a public preview. AWS describes it as built for cloud-native workloads on AWS, and lists a Linux kernel in the 7.1 series or later, SELinux switched on in enforcing mode by default, cryptographic acceleration through its AWS-LC library, updated compilers and language runtimes, and drivers for hardware accelerators used in AI and machine learning workloads.

The same post says preview machine images (AMIs) are available in all commercial AWS Regions for both x86-64 and Arm processors, and that container base images are published on the Amazon ECR Public Gallery. That covers the US and UK Regions most of our readers use. Feedback is collected through a public GitHub repository rather than through support tickets.

Preview means preview: what is and is not available now

The status matters more than the feature list. The Amazon Linux 2027 product page states that the preview is a pre-release testing program, that AWS Support agreements do not cover it, and that production workloads should stay on Amazon Linux 2023 until AL2027 reaches general availability.

Available now

Preview AMIs and container images that you can launch for evaluation and testing. The product page says there is no extra operating system charge during the preview; you pay the normal rate for the EC2 instances you run.

Announced for later

The product page describes a second preview phase in November 2026 that adds more packages and recipes for EKS-optimized images, and says general availability is expected in early 2027. AWS has not published an exact date. The page also says that, once generally available, AL2027 will receive five years of standard support with no licensing cost. Treat all of this as AWS's stated plan, not as something you can build a production schedule on yet.

The three Amazon Linux versions and where each one stands

The practical question for most businesses is not "should we adopt AL2027" but "which version are our servers on today". The dates below come from AWS's own pages.

• Amazon Linux 2: the Amazon Linux 2 FAQ states that it reached end of support on June 30, 2026 and no longer receives standard security updates.
• Amazon Linux 2023: the AL2023 release cadence documentation says standard support, with quarterly feature updates, ends on June 30, 2027, followed by a maintenance phase of security updates and critical fixes that ends on June 30, 2029.
• Amazon Linux 2027: public preview since September 3, 2026, not for production, general availability expected in early 2027.

AWS is direct about the first of these. The Amazon Linux 2 FAQ advises customers to migrate to Amazon Linux 2023 now rather than wait for a future version. In other words, AWS itself does not want AL2027 to be used as a reason to stay on an unsupported system.

What changes technically in Amazon Linux 2027

For the engineers on your team or at your development partner, the product page lists several changes that affect how applications are built and deployed. The package manager moves to DNF5, a rewrite of the tool used to install and update software. SELinux, the Linux security layer that restricts what each process may do, ships in enforcing mode, which can surface permission problems in software that ran without complaint on a more permissive setup. The default processor baseline on x86 becomes x86-64-v3, and the page lists current versions of Python, Java, Node.js, PHP, Go and Rust along with GCC 16.1, glibc 2.44 and OpenSSL 3.5.

AWS also says AL2027 will overlap with AL2023 on kernel versions and on at least one runtime version per language, with the stated aim of making migration easier. The product page does not describe a one-click upgrade from an older version, so plan on rebuilding servers and container images from the new base rather than upgrading them in place.

What this means for your business

The points in this section are our reading of the announcement, offered as guidance.

First, the urgent item is not the new release. It is any server, container image or build pipeline still on Amazon Linux 2. An operating system that no longer receives security patches is a growing risk for any business, and it becomes awkward quickly if you handle card payments, health data or personal data under US state privacy laws or UK GDPR, or if your customers send you security questionnaires. Regulatory expectations vary by sector and this is not legal advice, but "we run an unsupported operating system" is a difficult answer in most of those conversations.

Second, Amazon Linux 2023 is the right production target today, and it is supported until June 30, 2029. A team that moves to AL2023 now is not wasting effort. Much of the work in such a migration is in your own application: newer language runtimes, changed package names, updated build scripts. That work carries forward to AL2027.

Third, the cost of an operating system migration is driven less by the number of servers than by how they are built. If your infrastructure is defined in code and your application ships as a container image, changing the base operating system is mostly a test exercise. If servers were configured by hand years ago and nobody is sure what is installed on them, expect discovery work before any migration can start.

What to do next

A short, ordered plan is enough for most small and mid-sized teams.

• Inventory what you run: EC2 instances, container base images, build agents and any managed service whose platform version you chose yourself. Record the Amazon Linux version for each.
• Move anything on Amazon Linux 2 to Amazon Linux 2023, starting with systems exposed to the internet or holding customer data.
• Have an engineer launch an AL2027 preview image in a test account and run your automated tests against it. The goal is an early list of what breaks, particularly around SELinux and package changes, not a deployment.
• Put June 30, 2027 in the calendar as the end of AL2023 standard support, and revisit your plan when AWS announces AL2027 general availability.

If you depend on third-party software such as monitoring agents, security tools or database drivers, ask those vendors when they will support AL2027. Their timelines, not AWS's, often decide when a migration is realistic. If your application is built on a framework such as Laravel or Node.js, check which runtime versions your code and its dependencies support before you choose a target image.

Conclusion

Amazon Linux 2027 is a preview that AWS says is not for production, with general availability expected in early 2027 and no exact date yet. The decision that cannot wait is elsewhere: Amazon Linux 2 has been out of support since June 30, 2026, and AWS's own guidance is to move to Amazon Linux 2023 now. Test AL2027 on the side, keep production on AL2023, and note that AL2023's standard support phase ends on June 30, 2027.

If you are unsure which version your application runs on or what a migration would involve, Entrant Technologies builds and maintains web applications and custom software, and you can contact us to talk through your setup.