Introducing Amazon Corretto, a free OpenJDK distribution with long-term support

Original author: Arun Gupta
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Java is one of the most popular languages ​​used by AWS clients, and we strive to support Java while keeping this support free. Many of our customers have become worried that they will be forced to pay for the LTS version of Java when doing their workload. As a first step, we recently confirmed long-term Java support on Amazon Linux . However, our customers and the wider Java community are launching Java on various platforms, both on AWS and beyond. That is why we are pleased to announce a preliminary [preview] version of Amazon Corretto - a free, multiplatform and ready-to-use distribution for the OpenJDK distribution from Amazon.
“Amazon has a long and deep history with Java. I am very happy to see that the work of our internal, critical Java team becomes available to the rest of the world. ”
- James Gosling, creator of the Java language, has been working at AWS since May 2017]

Amazon launches Corretto in production for thousands of services. Corretto's patches and enhancements enable Amazon to solve large-scale, real-world problems by meeting high performance and scalability requirements. We make them available to customers with free and long-term support, with quarterly updates, including bug fixes and security updates. AWS also provides customers with urgent fixes outside the quarterly schedule.

Corretto comes with support for multiple platforms, allowing you to run it in the cloud, on its servers or on a local machine. Corretto 8 preview corresponds to OpenJDK 8 and is currently available for Amazon Linux 2, Microsoft Windows, macOS platforms and as a Docker image. Pre-builds can be downloaded from aws.amazon.com/corretto. The publicly available version of [General Availability] is scheduled for the first quarter of 2019, and will also include support for the Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux platforms. Corretto 11, corresponding to OpenJDK 11, will be released on these platforms with sufficient time for testing until April 2019.

We run the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) [test suite for testing JVM compliance for specifications] on every Corretto release to ensure compatibility with the Java SE platform. Corretto is being developed as a replacement for any of the Java SE distributions, if you are not using features not found in OpenJDK (for example, Java Flight Recorder [in fact, JFR was added by Oracle in OpenJDK 11]). After the Corretto build is installed on the host and properly configured to run your Java applications (for example, using alternatives on Linux), the existing command line parameters, settings, monitoring, and everything else will continue to work as before.

Amazon will distribute security updates to Corretto 8 for free at least until June 2023, and for Corretto 11 until August 2024. Corretto includes backports from newer versions, as well as fresh improvements from the OpenJDK community. The release process includes testing on thousands of Amazon services, which allows you to release patches within a few days of finding problems.

Beginning of work


The easiest way to try Corretto is to download the package for the selected platform and check the Java version:

% java -version
openjdk version "1.8.0_192"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_192-amazon-corretto-preview-b12)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.192-b12, mixed mode)

The download page has a list of links to installation instructions for all supported platforms.

Corretto and OpenJDK


Amazon has already made a small contribution to OpenJDK 8 and we look forward to working closely with the OpenJDK community on future enhancements to OpenJDK 8 and 11. We transfer the fixes made to OpenJDK, add improvements based on our own experience and needs, and then build the Corretto assembly . If the promotion of these patches are not successful, are postponed, or are not suitable for the OpenJDK project, we will provide them to our customers as long as the patches have value for them. If the problem is solved in OpenJDK in a different way, we will proceed to this solution as soon as this transition is safe. You can find the Corretto source code at github.com/corretto .

We plan that Corretto will become the default OpenJDK distribution on Amazon Linux 2 in 2019.

We encourage you to run your Java applications using Corretto. Download Corretto 8 by visiting aws.amazon.com/corretto , and learn more about it by reading the documentation at docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto . Feel free to ask any questions on StackOverflow or on Twitter ( @awsopen ).

about the author


Arun Gupta - Principal Open Source Technologist at AWS. Handles everything related to containers and Open Source in AWS. Over his shoulders has a long experience in the Sun, Oracle, Red Hat, Couchbase, and now in AWS. He leads a popular twitter account @arungupta , actively speaks at conferences (last year he spoke at the Moscow JPoint )
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