Bottlerocket is a Linux-based open-source operating system. It is purpose-built by Amazon Web Services for running containers on virtual machines or bare metal hosts.
Most customers today run containerized applications on general-purpose operating systems that are updated package-by-package, which makes OS updates difficult to automate. Updates to Bottlerocket are applied in a single step rather than package-by-package.
The single-step updates also improve uptime for container applications by minimizing update failures and enabling easy update rollbacks. Additionally, Bottlerocket includes only the essential software to run containers, which improves resource usage and reduces the attack surface.
Popular Linux distributions are designed to run not only containers, which enable applications to be run in multiple computing environments, but also a range of other workloads. Because they support a large number of use cases, they have a large number of components that can be difficult to manage.
When developing Bottlerocket, AWS left out many standard Linux components. They kept only the ones necessary to run container-based workloads, creating an operating system that it says is both easier to manage and more secure.
The extra security stems from the fact that Bottlerocket’s smaller code base leaves fewer potential weak points for hackers to exploit.
Bottlerocket is now generally available at no cost as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Benefits of using Bottlerocket
- Increased uptime for container applications
- Open-source development model enables custom builds
- Lower management overhead and operational costs
- Improved security and resource utilization
- Optimized performance through AWS integrations
- 3 years of support
