Download and Install Amazon Corretto 8 and 11

In this article, I will guide you how to download and install Amazon Corretto JDK (version 8 or 11) on Windows operating system – as an alternative to OpenJDK or Oracle JDK.

1. What is Amazon Corretto?

You know, Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK. This JDK distribution is backed by Amazon, with thousands of Amazon Web Services running on Corretto – so it’s highly reliable.

Why programmers and developers should use Amazon Corretto instead of OpenJDK and Oracle JDK out there?

Because it’s FREE for all purposes (including personal and commercial uses) and it has long-term support from Amazon with quarterly updates. Whereas OpenJDK is free without support; and Oracle JDK is not free for commercial use. And Oracle JDK provides long-term support for only paid customers.

So Amazon Corretto is a good replacement for OpenJDK and Oracle JDK. It is licensed under General Public License (GPL) version 2 with Class Path Exception.

As the name implies, Amazon Corretto 8 is built on OpenJDK 8 (Java 1.8) and Corretto 11 is built on OpenJDK 11.

2. Download Amazon Corretto

Head to Amazon Corretto homepage, and click the download button according to the version you wish:

For Windows operating system (64-bit), choose to download the installer program (MSI) for JDK:

Then it will download the amazon-corretto-VERSION-windows-x64.msi file. This is the installer program for Windows, which makes the setup process quick and easy.

3. Install Amazon Corretto

Run the downloaded .msi file to start installing Amazon Corretto. You will see the setup program appears:

Click Next, keep the default options presented as below:

You can notice that this installer will setup the JAVA_HOME system environment variable to point to Corretto, and add JDK bin folder path to the PATH system environment variable – very convenient! So you don’t have to manually update those variables after setup.

Then click Next to proceed. Click Finish when the setup completed.

NOTE: You can install Amazon Corretto JDK along with OpenJDK or Oracle JDK, but it will override the JAVA_HOME and PATH system environment variables.

Learn more:

• How to check Java version
• Java SE versions history
• How to set environment variables for Java using command line
• How to write, compile and run a hello world Java program for beginners
• What are JVM, JRE and JDK

About the Author:

Nam Ha Minh is certified Java programmer (SCJP and SCWCD). He began programming with Java back in the days of Java 1.4 and has been passionate about it ever since. You can connect with him on Facebook and watch his Java videos on YouTube.