Amazon SageMaker notebook instance now supports Amazon Linux 2

Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon SageMaker notebook instance supports Amazon Linux 2. You can now choose Amazon Linux 2 for your new Amazon SageMaker notebook instance to take advantage of the latest update and support provided by Amazon Linux 2.

Amazon SageMaker notebook instances are fully managed Jupyter Notebooks with pre-configured development environments for data science and machine learning. Data scientists and developers can spin up SageMaker Notebooks to interactively explore, visualize and prepare data, and build and deploy models on SageMaker.

Introduced in 2017, Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) is the next generation of Amazon Linux (AL1), a Linux server operating system from AWS first launched in September 2010. AL2 provides a secure, stable, and high-performance runtime environment to develop and run cloud and enterprise applications. With AL2, you get an environment that offers long-term support with access to the latest innovations in the Linux offering. AWS provides long-term security and maintenance updates for the AL2 AMI while the AL1 AMI ended its standard support on December 31, 2020 and has entered a maintenance support phase.

This launch rolls out AL2 AMI option for users on SageMaker notebook instance. You now have options to launch a notebook instance with either AL2 or AL1 AMI. After April 18, 2022, a new notebook instance with the AL1 AMI will use the last snapshot of the AL1 AMI created on April 18, 2022 and will no longer receive any version updates and security patches when restarted. An existing notebook instance with the AL1 AMI, when restarted, will receive a one-time update to the last snapshot of the AL1 AMI created on April 18, 2022 and will no longer receive any version updates and security patches afterwards.

For more details about this launch as well as the instructions on how to migrate from AL1 notebooks to AL2 notebooks, please refer to this blog post.