Maintenance: Drop Java 11 support - Minimum Java version moving to 17

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Summary

Important

On May 11th, 2026, Powertools for AWS Lambda (Java) will require Java 17 or later. Java 11 will no longer be supported.

Java 11 is holding back critical dependency upgrades that require Java 17+ as baseline (JUnit 6, resilience4j, protobuf-maven-plugin, json-schema-validator, DynamoDBLocal). The broader ecosystem (Spring Boot, Quarkus, and Micronaut) has already moved to Java 17+.

As per our versioning policy: "AWS reserves the right to stop support for an underlying dependency without increasing the major SDK version."

What this means

• The library will require Java 17 as the minimum compilation and runtime target
• This remains v2.x per our versioning policy
• The AWS Lambda java11 runtime is not being removed by AWS, but this library will no longer support it
• If you are still using Java 11, we recommend upgrading to at least Java 17, or ideally Java 21 or 25 (LTS). All are available as AWS Lambda runtimes

Why is this needed?

Blocked dependency upgrades: #2229, #2032, #2334, #2266, #2422, #1955, #2337

Which area does this relate to?

Automation

Acknowledgment

• This request meets Powertools for AWS Lambda (Java) Tenets
• Should this be considered in other Powertools for AWS Lambda languages? i.e. Python, TypeScript, and .NET