Patch Manager prerequisites

Make sure that you have met the required prerequisites before using Patch Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager.

SSM Agent version

Version 2.0.834.0 or later of SSM Agent is running on the instances you want to manage with Patch Manager.

Note

An updated version of SSM Agent is released whenever new capabilities are added to Systems Manager or updates are made to existing capabilities. If an older version of the agent is running on an instance, some SSM Agent processes can fail. For that reason, we recommend that you automate the process of keeping SSM Agent up-to-date on your instances. For information, see Automating updates to SSM Agent. Subscribe to the SSM Agent Release Notes page on GitHub to get notifications about SSM Agent updates.

Connectivity to the patch source

If your instances don't have a direct connection to the Internet and you're using an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) with a VPC endpoint, you must ensure that the instances have access to the source patch repositories (repos). On Linux instances, patch updates are typically downloaded from the remote repos configured on the instance. Therefore, the instance must be able to connect to the repos so the patching can be performed. For more information, see How security patches are selected.

Windows Server instances must be able to connect to the Windows Update Catalog or Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). Confirm that your instances have connectivity to the Microsoft Update Catalog through an internet gateway, NAT gateway, or NAT instance. If you are using WSUS, confirm that the instance has connectivity to the WSUS server in your environment. For more information, see Issue: Instance doesn't have access to Windows Update Catalog or WSUS.

S3 endpoint access

Whether your instances operate in a private or public network, without access to the required AWS managed Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, patching operations fail. For information about the S3 buckets your managed instances must be able to access, see SSM Agent communications with AWS managed S3 buckets and Step 6: (Optional) Create a Virtual Private Cloud endpoint.

Supported operating systems

The Patch Manager capability doesn't support all the same operating systems versions that are supported by other Systems Manager capabilities. For example, Patch Manager doesn't support CentOS 6.3 or Raspbian Stretch. (For the full list of Systems Manager-supported operating systems, see Systems Manager prerequisites.) Therefore, ensure that the instances you want to use with Patch Manager are running one of the operating systems listed in the following table.

Operating system	Details
Linux	Amazon Linux 2012.03 - 2018.03 Amazon Linux 2 2 - 2.0 CentOS 6.5 - 7.9, 8.0-8.2 Debian Server 8.x, 9.x, and 10.x Oracle Linux 7.5 - 8.3 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5 - 8.3 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12.0 and later 12.x versions, 15.0 and 15.1 Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS, 16.04 LTS, 18.04 LTS, 20.04 LTS, and 20.10 STR Note Instances created from an Amazon Linux AMI that are using a proxy must be running a current version of the Python requests module in order to support Patch Manager operations. For more information, see Upgrade the Python requests module on Amazon Linux instances that use a proxy server.
macOS	macOS 10.14.x (Mojave) and 10.15.x (Catalina)
Windows	Windows Server 2008 through Windows Server 2019, including R2 versions. Important As of January 14, 2020, Windows Server 2008 is no longer supported for feature or security updates from Microsoft. Legacy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 still include version 2 of SSM Agent preinstalled, but Systems Manager no longer officially supports 2008 versions and no longer updates the agent for these versions of Windows Server. In addition, SSM Agent version 3.0 might not be compatible with all operations on Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2. The final officially supported version of SSM Agent for Windows Server 2008 versions is 2.3.1644.0.