How to upgrade Ubuntu LTS to Ubuntu Pro on AWS using AWS License Manager

Key Value
Summary How to upgrade Ubuntu LTS instances to Ubuntu Pro using AWS License Manager
Categories cloud, server, aws
Difficulty 1
Author Carlos Bravo carlos.bravo@canonical.com

Overview

Duration: 01:00

In April 2023, AWS released a new functionality that allows users running Ubuntu LTS to upgrade their instances to Ubuntu Pro with just a few clicks. This tutorial will cover all the steps needed for upgrading Ubuntu LTS instances to Ubuntu Pro on AWS.

What you’ll need

What you’ll learn

How to use AWS license manager to do a license conversion from Ubuntu LTS to Ubuntu Pro.

Getting started

Duration 1:00

To check if your instances are managed by SSM, go to the SSM console and check if the instances you would like to upgrade appear as managed nodes under fleet management. If they don’t appear, follow the links provided above and ensure you have completed the steps correctly. You may need to either restart the instance or directly the SSM agent: sudo snap restart amazon-ssm-agent to re-activate it.

Shut down your machines

Duration: 02:00

Go to EC2 and shutdown all the machines you would like to upgrade.

Once they are totally stopped, you can proceed to the next step.

Create a License Conversion to upgrade to Ubuntu Pro

Duration: 07:00

Go to AWS License Manager and select License type conversion on the left side menu.

And click on the Create license type conversion button.

In the next screen, select Ubuntu LTS in the dropdown menu as shown in the next screen.

Your machines should appear in the table below as shown in the following picture:

Select all the instances you would like to upgrade. At the point of writing this document, License conversion on AWS License Manager is limited up to 10 machines on the web console. Click next to continue with the conversion.

In the next screen you will be asked for the License type destination where Ubuntu Pro is the only option at the moment. Click next for the final screen confirmation and click on the Convert button.

Now you can wait and check the conversion status after a while.

That’s all Folks!

Duration: 01:00

The confirmation page will look like as shown below. If for any reason the conversion status shows failure, you would need to double check on the machine whether it has network access and pro client up to date, as mentioned earlier in this document.

You can verify the upgrade by login into one of the machines to check the Ubuntu pro status as shown below:

Further reading

2 Likes

In addition to indicating that ubuntu-advantage-tools needs to be apt installed, can you include cloud-init as well? The command pro auto-attach will fail if the command cloud-id is unavailable, and the cloud-id command comes from the cloud-init package.

# pro auto-attach
Unable to determine auto-attach platform support

Yes, cloud-init should already be installed on all Ubuntu instances in AWS, but it is possible that some users have removed it after initial setup, and there’s no indication that it’s required for this process.

Thanks for the info. It s a very good point.