How to upgrade from EKS AL2 to EKS AL2023 - Amazon Batch
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

How to upgrade from EKS AL2 to EKS AL2023

The Amazon EKS optimized AMIs are available in two families based on Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) and Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023). AL2023 is a Linux-based operating system designed to provide a secure, stable, and high-performance environment for your cloud applications. For more information about the differences between AL2 and AL2023 see Upgrade from Amazon Linux 2 to Amazon Linux 2023 in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

Important

Amazon will end support for Amazon EKS AL2-optimized and AL2-accelerated AMIs, starting 11/26/25. We recommend migrating Amazon Batch Amazon EKS compute environments to Amazon Linux 2023 prior to 11/26/25 to maintain optimal performance and security. While you can continue using Amazon Batch-provided Amazon EKS optimized Amazon Linux 2 AMIs on your Amazon EKS compute environments beyond the 11/26/25 end-of-support date, these compute environments will no longer receive any new software updates, security patches, or bug fixes from Amazon. It is your responsibility to maintain these compute environments on the Amazon EKS optimized Amazon Linux 2 AMI after end-of-life.

Depending on how your compute environment is configured you can use one of the following upgrade paths from AL2 to AL2023.

Upgrade using Ec2Configuraiton.ImageType
Upgrade using launch templates

  • If you have any kubelet extra arguments defined in a launch template or launch template override, they need to updated to the new kubelet extra arguments format.

    If you mismatch the kubelet extra arguments format then the extra arguments aren't applied.

  • For AL2023 AMIs, containerd is the only supported container runtime. You do not need to specify container runtime for EKS_AL2023 in the launch template.

    You can't specify a customised container runtime with EKS_AL2023.

  • If you use a launch template or launch template override that specifies an AMI based on EKS_AL2023 then you need to set userdataType to EKS_NODEADM.

    If you mismatch the userdataType and AMI then the node won't join the EKS cluster.