Blog Post

Linux and Open Source Blog
2 MIN READ

Canonical Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Reaching End of Standard Support

ClausW's avatar
ClausW
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
May 17, 2023

On 31 May 2023, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will reach the end of standard support. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) was released on 23 April 2018, introducing improved UEFI Secure Boot and broader Kernel Livepatch coverage for enhanced security on Azure. You can continue to use your existing virtual machines, however, security, feature, and maintenance updates will no longer be provided by Canonical and may leave your systems vulnerable. 

 

Recommended action:

 

It’s important to act before 31 May 2023 to ensure you’re on a supported operating system. Microsoft recommends either migrating to the next Ubuntu LTS release or upgrading to Ubuntu Pro to gain access to extended security and maintenance from Canonical.  

 

Upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or Ubuntu 22.04 

 

Transitioning to the latest operating system, such as Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS, is important for performance, hardware enablement, new technology benefits, and is recommended for new instances. It may be a complex process for existing deployments and should be properly scoped and tested with your workloads.  

 

While there’s no direct upgrade path from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, you can directly upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, and then to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, or directly install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.   

 

See the Ubuntu Server upgrade guide for more information. 

 

Ubuntu Pro – Extended Security Maintenance to 2028 

 

Ubuntu Pro includes security patching for all Ubuntu packages due to Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) for Infrastructure and Applications and optional 24/7 phone and ticket support. Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS will remain fully supported until April 2028. 

 

Ubuntu Pro is available for free for personal and small-scale commercial users on up to 5 machines and with transparent, per-machine pricing for enterprises. 

New virtual machines can be deployed with Ubuntu Pro from the Azure Marketplace. You can also upgrade existing virtual machines to Ubuntu Pro by purchasing from Canonical.  

 

Note on the retirement of ‘`UbuntuLTS’` UrnAlias for Azure CLI and PowerShell 

 

Starting October, 2023, the ‘`UbuntuLTS’` UrnAlias,,, used for deployments from the Azure CLI and Powershell, along with other popular aliases will be retired in favor of versioned aliases. This is a breaking change and may require code changes. Stay tuned to the Microsoft Azure Blog for more updates later this year. 

 

More Information 

 

More information covering Ubuntu 18.04 LTS End of Standard Support can be found here. 

Updated Nov 09, 2023
Version 2.0

9 Comments

Sort By
  • asdasdadqwdq's avatar
    asdasdadqwdq
    Copper Contributor
    Jun 01, 2023

    We have upgraded a while ago to 22.04, but received the "Action recommended" e-mail yesterday.

    Our (only) VM does report the new version correctly (within the azure portal) but states "18.04-LTS" as the plan within the properties section.

     

    Set-AzVMPlan seems not to work...

  • NyanLynnHtet's avatar
    NyanLynnHtet
    Copper Contributor
    May 31, 2023

    Srbalaji2195AKS uses VMSS in their cluster’s backend. I don't have an idea about manual upgrading the node pool; for more details, hope Microsoft's product team Justin Davies can help with your query. As per my testing, the upgrade k8s version (My current k8s version is 1.23.8 -> 1.24.9 -> 1.24.10 [Upgrade version steps by steps]) is still using Ubuntu 18.04 as the node image. After upgrading to K8s version 1.25.5, the default node image version was changed to 22.04 by default without any changes from my side. You can also refer to my attachment. For more details, please create a service ticket and contact Microsoft Support for more support.

     

     

  • Srbalaji2195's avatar
    Srbalaji2195
    Copper Contributor
    May 31, 2023

    NyanLynnHtet 
    Can you please help me understand if it is related to upgrading the AKS node pools or VMs because even we do not have any VMs running on Ubuntu 18.04 but node images.

    As of now, we cannot upgrade AKS to 1.25.x due to some project dependencies and java errors. 

  • NyanLynnHtet's avatar
    NyanLynnHtet
    Copper Contributor
    May 26, 2023

    Sergey Krulikovskiy Upgrade the control plane and worker nodes to a minimum of K8S version 1.25.5, and the node OS image will be upgraded automatically to 22.04. Hope this helps for you.

  • Justin Davies's avatar
    Justin Davies
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    May 24, 2023

    Hi from the AKS product team.  

    We will be providing node image updates for you to stay up to date with your 18.04 images for Kubernetes 1.24 environments.  You will not longer receive the nightly security updates, and will need to deploy these from the weekly VHD updates.

  • Sergey Krulikovskiy's avatar
    Sergey Krulikovskiy
    Copper Contributor
    May 18, 2023

    Hello,

     

    I'm new to azure and this info is a bit confusing for me. Hope someone can help me.

    So I don't have any VMs on my Azure subscription. But we have some outdated AKS clusters (v1.24) which running AKSUbuntu-1804gen2containerd-202303.06.0 as node image.

     

    As far as I understood I got this alert because of node's core image is 18.04 and I should upgrade it. Am I right? 

     

    Thanks in advance.