In March this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) teased the first public release of its brand new Linux-based OS, Bottlerocket. Following the same, AWS Product Manager Samartha Chandrashekar has now unveiled the general availability of Bottlerocket.
This means you can use this open-source Linux distribution to host and run containers on virtual machines or bare metal hosts. For those who don’t know, a container is just like a normal application that bundles all the codes and its dependencies together.
It helps to run containerized applications in any environment and platform. This is why AWS has created Bottlerocket from scratch to let customers adopt containers to run their workloads while preserving security, operations, and manageability at scale.
Based on Linux, Bottlerocket also leverages its features to provide enhanced security such as dm-verity (Device-mapper’s verity target), eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter), cgroups (control groups), namespaces, and seccomp.
If you still care about its security, let me tell you about Bottlerocket that large parts of its components are written in the most loved programming language, Rust, that already prevents vulnerable memory-related errors like buffer overflows.
How To Use Bottlerocket OS?
Though you can run Bottlerocket as a standalone OS, you can also use it by getting AWS-provided Bottlerocket Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with either Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) or Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).
To set up Bottlerocket with Amazon services, follow the official guide for using Bottlerocket AMI with Amazon EKS or Amazon ECS.
Additionally, you can also create your own custom builds of Bottlerocket with your desired changes. To do so, fork the GitHub repository, make your changes, and then follow the official building guide.
