Below, you will find this month's Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Gold Images (GIs) updates from the CMS Hybrid Cloud Team.
Upcoming Updates
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL9) CMS GI available now:
- The new RHEL9 CMS GI better aligns to Acceptable Risk Safeguards (ARS) 5. As such, there are major differences between RHEL9 and previous versions.
- Please read the RHEL9 Usage Guide available on Cloud.CMS.Gov (CCG) and test/develop the new RHEL9 in your lower environments before deploying it live into production.
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Amazon Linux 2023 with Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Optimization CMS GI available now:
- Note that existing launch template configurations, based on the EKS-optimized AL2 GI, will not work for AL2023, as the node initialization process has changed.
- Please review the Amazon-published documentation highlighting the changes and the CCG page: Changes from AL2 to AL2023.
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Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) CMS GI:
- Be aware that as an added security measure, the /tmp directory has been mounted with the NOEXEC option, which will not allow the execution of binaries within /tmp.
- This change may impact 3rd-party tools that execute scripts out of the /tmp directory, like Packer.
- Packer does have the option to specify a different directory to execute scripts from (see the documentation for more details).
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CMS Marketplace Customers to utilize "Bring Your Own License" (BYOL) Red Hat GIs only:
- For CMS Marketplace customers, please note that Marketplace Information Technology Group (MITG) has a dedicated license for Red Hat, which includes premium support. Thus, if a Marketplace customer utilizes a regular Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) GI and not a BYOL RHEL, they will incur unnecessary cost.
- Note that all BYOL GIs have "byol" in the GI name.
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Windows 2016 (WIN2016) OS End of Life (EOL) in January 2027:
- In anticipation of Microsoft's Windows 2016 operating system EOL, the last CMS WIN2016 GI will be released in 2026.
- Please plan to upgrade to a newer version of Windows (2019 or 2022) before Open Enrollment (OE) begins in 2026.
- Additional information will be available in 2025.
Gold Image Accessibility
CMS GI availability is based on the respective team's Customer Automation and Management Platform (CAMP) details. If a team would like to request a new CMS GI, please open a Hybrid Cloud Support Ticket and notify the designated Infrastructure and Users Services Group (IUSG) Hosting Coordinator.
