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Bottlerocket, an open source Linux distribution built to run containers

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Bottlerocket, an open source Linux distribution built to run containers

#3

Post by solatic »

As strong as the engineering behind Bottlerocket seems to be, I'm not entirely sure who they built it for, except as a foundational component for AWS's managed offerings.

If you, as an AWS customer, decide to fully embrace AWS lock-in, then why would you run this yourself on an EC2 instance instead of running ECS or EKS? If you're trying to avoid AWS lock-in, why would you choose an OS that's locking you into AWS Systems Manager and Amazon Linux 2 for debugging needs?

Re: Bottlerocket, an open source Linux distribution built to run containers

#4

Post by acdha »

solatic wrote: post #3

As strong as the engineering behind Bottlerocket seems to be, I'm not entirely sure who they built it for, except as a foundational component for AWS's managed offerings. If you, as an AWS customer, decide to fully embrace AWS lock-in, then why would you run this yourself on an EC2 instance instead of running ECS or EKS? If you're trying to avoid AWS lock-in, why would you choose an OS that's locking you into AWS Sys…

There are varying levels of lock-in. A Linux distribution to run containers is a lot easier to replace than, say, a database with a proprietary query language custom semantics.

Re: Bottlerocket, an open source Linux distribution built to run containers

#5

Post by captn3m0 »

solatic wrote: post #3

As strong as the engineering behind Bottlerocket seems to be, I'm not entirely sure who they built it for, except as a foundational component for AWS's managed offerings. If you, as an AWS customer, decide to fully embrace AWS lock-in, then why would you run this yourself on an EC2 instance instead of running ECS or EKS? If you're trying to avoid AWS lock-in, why would you choose an OS that's locking you into AWS Sys…

>sure who they built it for

Anytime AWS finds many of its customers using something outside of AWS, they want to build it in-house. AWS customers were using CoreOS a lot, hence this.

Re: Bottlerocket, an open source Linux distribution built to run containers

#6

Post by coder543 »

solatic wrote: post #3

As strong as the engineering behind Bottlerocket seems to be, I'm not entirely sure who they built it for, except as a foundational component for AWS's managed offerings. If you, as an AWS customer, decide to fully embrace AWS lock-in, then why would you run this yourself on an EC2 instance instead of running ECS or EKS? If you're trying to avoid AWS lock-in, why would you choose an OS that's locking you into AWS Sys…

If you're using an ECS or EKS Cluster, you still have to run some operating system on the ECS Container Instances. The containers have to run somewhere.

There are a variety of options currently, including one from Amazon, but Bottlerocket seems designed to be a next-generation OS for container instances. It's extremely minimal, and designed to be as secure as possible, with transactional automatic updates.

Ideally, I would just deploy Bottlerocket as the underlying OS on my ECS Cluster, and then never have to actually do any management of the Instance OSes whatsoever. I would deploy containers on top of my ECS Cluster, Bottlerocket would keep itself up to date and secure, and my containers would live happily ever after. It would hopefully feel more similar to using Fargate than not, except without paying the higher price for Fargate, and having access to the wider variety of hardware configurations available to regular ECS.

Amazon has specifically said this in the Bottlerocket repo:

> Bottlerocket is architected such that different cloud environments and container orchestrators can be supported in the future.

It's mainly useful in concert with ECS or EKS right now, but it is architected to be useful in other places as well.

I'm excited about Bottlerocket as a project, and I'm glad it's open source instead of just an opaque AMI that you can use on ECS or EKS.

Re: Bottlerocket, an open source Linux distribution built to run containers

#7

Post by solatic »

coder543 wrote: post #6
solatic wrote: post #3

As strong as the engineering behind Bottlerocket seems to be, I'm not entirely sure who they built it for, except as a foundational component for AWS's managed offerings. If you, as an AWS customer, decide to fully embrace AWS lock-in, then why would you run this yourself on an EC2 instance instead of running ECS or EKS? If you're trying to avoid AWS lock-in, why would you choose an OS that's locking you into AWS Sys…

If you're using an ECS or EKS Cluster, you still have to run some operating system on the ECS Container Instances. The containers have to run somewhere. There are a variety of options currently, including one from Amazon, but Bottlerocket seems designed to be a next-generation OS for container instances. It's extremely minimal, and designed to be as secure as possible, with transactional automatic updates. Ideally, I…

> It's mainly useful in concert with ECS or EKS right now, but it is architected to be useful in other places as well.

Right, this is the big question. If a community forms to support Bottlerocket off of AWS, then that's one thing, but until then, it basically just seems like a better option for ECS or EKS.

Re: Bottlerocket, an open source Linux distribution built to run containers

#9

Post by coder543 »

solatic wrote: post #7
coder543 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using an ECS or EKS Cluster, you still have to run some operating system on the ECS Container Instances. The containers have to run somewhere. There are a variety of options currently, including one from Amazon, but Bottlerocket seems designed to be a next-generation OS for container instances. It's extremely minimal, and designed to be as secure as possible, with transactional automatic updates. Ideally, I…

> It's mainly useful in concert with ECS or EKS right now, but it is architected to be useful in other places as well. Right, this is the big question. If a community forms to support Bottlerocket off of AWS, then that's one thing, but until then, it basically just seems like a better option for ECS or EKS.

>>> I'm not entirely sure who they built it for, except as a foundational component for AWS's managed offerings.

>>

> If a community forms to support Bottlerocket off of AWS, then that's one thing, but until then, it basically just seems like a better option for ECS or EKS.

I'm failing to see why that's a problem or a source of confusion. There's a clearly defined market of "who they built it for", and there's a community option to expand Bottlerocket's target market.

The code is open source, so anyone could fork Bottlerocket and modify it to suit their needs immediately. Will Bottlerocket see success beyond ECS and EKS? Only time will tell... literally no one knows yet.

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