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bottlerocket-os
bottlerocket
Rust2020–2026
bottlerocket-os / bottlerocket

bottlerocket

An operating system designed for hosting containers

30Distinct people
37Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
9.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An operating system designed for hosting containers

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year37 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-03-10 20:35:07 UTC to 2026-10-21 21:52:34 UTC.

051015202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 19 mentions; 1 submissions, 18 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC19118
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Bottlerocket OS Welcome to Bottlerocket! Bottlerocket is a free and open-source Linux-based operating system meant for hosting containers. To learn more about Bottlerocket, visit the official Bottlerocket website and documentation. Otherwise, if you’re ready to jump right in, read one of our setup guides for running Bottlerocket in Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, or VMware. If you're interested in running Bottlerocket on bare metal servers, please refer to the provisioning guide to get started. 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. You can read more about what drives us in our charter. 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. Some notable features include: API access for configuring your system, with secure out-of-band access methods when you need them. Updates based on partition flips, for fast and reliable system updates. Modeled configuration that's automatically migrated through updates. Security as a top priority. Participate in the Community There are many ways to take part in the Bottlerocket community: Join us on Meetup to hear about the latest Bottlerocket (virtual/in-person) events and community meetings. Community meetings are typically every other week. Details can be found under the Events section on Meetup, and you will receive email notifications if you become a member of the Meetup group. (It's free to join!) Start or join a discussion if you have questions about Bottlerocket. If you're interested in contributing, thank you! Please see our contributor's guide. Contact us If you find a security issue, please contact our security team rather than opening an issue. We use GitHub issues to track other bug reports and feature requests. You can look at existing issues to see whether your concern is already known. If not, you can select from a few templates and get some guidance on the type of information that would be most helpful. Contact us with a new issue here. We don't have other communication channels set up quite yet, but don't worry about making an issue or a discussion thread! You can let us know about things that seem difficult, or even ways you might like to help. Variants To start, we're focusing on the use of Bottlerocket as a host OS in AWS EKS Kubernetes clusters and Amazon ECS clusters. We’re excited to get early feedback and to continue working on more use cases! Bottlerocket is architected such that different cloud environments and container orchestrators can be supported in the future. A build of Bottlerocket that supports different features or integration characteristics is known as a 'variant'. The artifacts of a build will include the architecture and variant name. For example, an x86_64 build of the aws-k8s-1.32 variant will produce an image named bottlerocket-aws-k8s-1.32-x86_64-<version>-<commit>.img. The following variants support EKS, as described above: aws-k8s-1.31 aws-k8s-1.32 aws-k8s-1.33 aws-k8s-1.34 aws-k8s-1.35 aws-k8s-1.36 aws-k8s-1.37 aws-k8s-1.31-nvidia aws-k8s-1.32-nvidia aws-k8s-1.33-nvidia aws-k8s-1.34-nvidia aws-k8s-1.35-nvidia aws-k8s-1.36-nvidia aws-k8s-1.37-nvidia The following variants support ECS: aws-ecs-2 aws-ecs-2-nvidia aws-ecs-3 aws-ecs-3-fips aws-ecs-3-nvidia We also have variants that are designed to be Kubernetes worker nodes in VMware: vmware-k8s-1.31 vmware-k8s-1.32 vmware-k8s-1.33 vmware-k8s-1.34 vmware-k8s-1.35 vmware-k8s-1.36 vmware-k8s-1.37 The following variants are no longer supported: All Kubernetes variants using Kubernetes 1.30 and earlier VMware variants using Kubernetes 1.30 and earlier Bare metal variants for Kubernetes ECS-1 variants We recommend users replace nodes running these variants with the latest variant compatible with their cluster. Architectures Our supported architectures include x86_64 and aarch64 (written as arm64 in some contexts). Setup 🚶 🏃 Bottlerocket is best used with a container orchestrator. To get started with Kubernetes in Amazon EKS, please see QUICKSTART-EKS. To get started with Kubernetes in VMware, please see QUICKSTART-VMWARE. To get started with Amazon ECS, please see QUICKSTART-ECS. These guides describe: how to set up a cluster with the orchestrator, so your Bottlerocket instance can run containers how to launch a Bottlerocket instance in EC2 or VMware To see how to provision Bottlerocket on bare metal, see PROVISIONING-METAL. To build your own Bottlerocket images, please see BUILDING. It describes: how to build an image how to register an EC2 AMI from an image To publish your built Bottlerocket images, please see PUBLISHING. It describes: how to make TUF repos including your image how to copy your AMI across regions how to mark your AMIs public or grant access to specific accounts how to make your AMIs discoverable using SSM parameters Exploration To improve security, there's no SSH server in a Bottlerocket image, and not even a shell. Don't panic! There are a couple out-of-band access methods you can use to explore Bottlerocket like you would a typical Linux system. Either option will give you a shell within Bottlerocket. From there, you can change settings, manually update Bottlerocket, debug problems, and generally explore. Note: These methods require that your instance has permission to access the ECR repository where these containers live; the appropriate policy to add to your instance's IAM role is AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryReadOnly. Control container Bottlerocket has a "control" container, enabled by default, that runs outside of the orchestrator in a separa
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

37 sources
There's not one answer to your question, but here's mine: kubelet and AWS SSM (which, to the best of my knowledge will work on non-AWS infra it just needs to be provided creds). Bottlerocket <https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket#setup> comes batteries included with both of those things, and is cheaply provisioned with (ahem) TOML user-data <https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket#description-...> In that specific case, one can also have "systemd for normal people" via its support for static Pod definitions, so one can run containerized toys on boot even without being a formal member of a kubernetes cluster AWS SSM provides auditing of what a person might normally type via ssh, and kubelet similarly, just at a different abstraction level. For clarity, I am aware that it's possible via some sshd trickery one could get sim
Read the rest
ilar audit and log egress, but I haven't seen one of those in practice whereas kubelet and AWS SSM provide it out of the box
In Fearless SSH: Short-lived certificates bring Zero Trust to infrastructure
Bottlerocket does not off FIPS mode like most other enterprise *nix distributions. Just to save anybody the trouble who needs FIPS approved encryption for host OSes that you use at work for various compliance programs. This makes Bottlerocket a non-starter for us. A very active issue has been open for over 2 years on this and the dev teams don't seem to be convinced that this is important. We even communicated with the dev team through our dedicated AWS reps and they have no interest in adding this. Here is the open 2+ year thread on this: https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket/issues/1667
In Bottlerocket – Minimal, immutable Linux OS with verified boot
To add to the other excellent answers, I would recommend adding Bottlerocket to your reading list: https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket#readme I'm also aware of (but haven't used) https://github.com/siderolabs/talos#readme I just realized your question may have implied a desktop os, whereas Bottlerocket, Flatcar, and likely the others in this specific thread are server-side. I don't have much experience with trying to solve that problem on the desktop except for the horror-show that is snap
In Wolfi: A community Linux OS designed for the container and cloud-native era
I've been meaning to take a look at Bottlerocket[^1] as an alternative to a custom spin of Kubernetes but we haven't really had a chance to dig into it. The folks over at Fly[^2] have built an awesome edge platform out of Firecracker, and ultimately, where I want to take the next generation of our internal compute offering. I am eagerly looking forward to any and all presentations they do on their work. [^1]: https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket [^2]: https://fly.io/docs/reference/architecture/
In Using Firecracker and Go to run short, untrusted code execution jobs (2021)

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