Announcing Bottlerocket, a new open source Linux-based operating system purpose-built to run containers

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the public preview of Bottlerocket, a new open source Linux-based Operating System (OS) that is purpose-built to run containers. Bottlerocket comes with a single-step update mechanism and includes only the essential software to run containers. These properties enable customers to use container orchestrators to manage OS updates with minimal disruptions, enabling better uptime for containerized applications and lower operational cost. Currently, Bottlerocket is supported for use with Amazon EKS. Amazon ECS will also be supported soon.

Most containers today are run on general-purpose OSes, which are built to support applications packaged in a variety of formats, including containers. Updates to these general-purpose OSes are applied on a package-by-package basis. The complex dependencies among their packages can result in errors, making the OS update process challenging to automate. By contrast, updates to Bottlerocket can be applied and rolled back in a single step which makes them easy to automate, reducing management overhead and improving uptime for containerized applications.

You can get started with Bottlerocket by launching Amazon EC2 instances with the Bottlerocket AMI, and joining them to an Amazon EKS cluster by following the instructions here. Bottlerocket is developed as an open source project on GitHub. AWS-provided builds of Bottlerocket are covered under AWS Support plans. To learn more, visit the Bottlerocket page.

Modified 8/25/2021 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, expired links in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.