Hi everyone,
I wanted to document a breaking issue that recently started appearing on AWS environments (specifically Amazon Linux 2023) as of mid-November 2025, in case anyone else is hitting a wall with their production builds.
The Symptom
If you are running Julia on AWS (EC2, Lambda, or Docker containers based on amazonlinux:2023), you might suddenly see HTTP.jl or OpenSSL.jl failing during precompilation or initialization with an error like this:
JuliaERROR: LoadError: AssertionError: ret == 1 Stacktrace: [1] OpenSSL.SSLContext(ssl_method::OpenSSL.SSLMethod, verify_file::String) @ OpenSSL .../src/ssl.jl:165
This seems to happen even if your Manifest.toml hasn’t changed.
The Cause
Amazon recently rolled out the AL2023.9 release (Nov 2025), which updates the system OpenSSL version from 3.0 to 3.2.2 and enforces stricter FIPS provider management.
When OpenSSL_jll artifact (used by HTTP.jl) tries to initialize on the new AL2023 kernel, it conflicts with the system’s FIPS configuration, causing the context initialization to return 0 (failure) instead of 1 (success).
Fixes
Not sure how to best fix this I only saw about ways on finding a way to use the openssl of AWS directly but would be nice if this could maybe be handled by OpenSSL.jl
For now I am fortunate to be able to drop a dependency to avoid this but I guess others will run into this so just wanted to open up a topic for this.