AWS Launches a New Linux Distribution

Amazon’s cloud platform (AWS) has created and released a new distribution of Linux aimed at container deployments for bare metal and virtual machines. The new operating system, Bottlerocket, is still in the developer review phase, but can be tested as an Amazon Image Machine for EC2.

This purpose-built Linux distribution supports all images that follow the Open Container Initiative  image format (such as Docker images) and uses a read-only file system for security and integrity. To further bolster the security of the platform, SSH access is discouraged and only available through the Bottlerocket admin container tool.

Bottlerocket shrugs off the standard update process in favor of automatic image-based updates by way of an orchestration service, such as Amazon EKS. The single step update process reduces management overhead and improves uptime for container applications by minimizing update failures and enabling easy rollbacks.

The Bottlerocket OS offers a much-improved resource usages because it contains only the essential applications and services to run containers. This means Bottlerocket is a purpose-built platform and not intended for general usage.

Once Bottlerocket has been released for general usage, it will be supported for three years. Already, Bottlerocket has a number of interested partners, such as Alcide, Armory, CrowdStrike, Datadog, New Relic Sysdig, Tigera, Trend Micro, and Waveworks.

Original announcement: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/bottlerocket-open-source-os-for-container-hosting/