It would appear that Amazon have released another new Linux Operating System, this time dedicated to hosting containers.
Bottlerocket focuses on security and maintainability, providing a reliable, consistent, and safe platform for container-based workloads. This is a reflection of what we’ve learned building operating systems and services at Amazon. The base operating system has just what you need to run containers reliably, and is built with standard open-source components. Bottlerocket-specific additions focus on reliable updates and on the API. Instead of making configuration changes manually, you can change settings with an API call, and these changes are automatically migrated through updates.
https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket
It seems to include some interesting design choices, notably;
- Read-only root filesystem
- No package manager
- Does not come with standard tools like SSH and Python installed
It will be interesting to see who finds this useful, but I can’t help thinking that some developers are going to see these sorts of restrictions as a bit of a straight-jacket and what you get with in terms of enhanced security and traceability, is likely countered by usability issues.
A review should be interesting once people start using it.
