We run customer workloads in containers, and each container gets its own VM (an EC2 instance or a microVM). Every VM needs a few OCI images regardless of the workload: the language runtime image the customer's workload is built on, a log forwarding sidecar, an internal monitoring container. The obvious way to provide …

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Our container platform moved from Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) to Bottlerocket. Soon after the migration started, a partner team that runs Spark jobs reported a regression. Their jobs still finished successfully, but far more of them reported zero "storage read bytes": about 23% of tasks on AL2, and about 56% on …

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I was getting an arm64 build of our Bottlerocket variant ready for production on Graviton EC2 instances. Load tests kept failing at a low rate. Somewhere between 0.3% and 1% of instances froze a few seconds into boot and never came back. The x86_64 build of the same variant has never done this. I never found the root …

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We run an OpenTelemetry Collector (otel-collector) as a systemd service on Bottlerocket. Its Prometheus metrics endpoint was configured on port 51000, which falls inside the default Linux ephemeral port range. On a small portion of EC2 instances, the otel-collector kept restarting, failing to bind with EADDRINUSE. …

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Bottlerocket v11.0.0 dropped the socat package from bottlerocket-core-kit (#742). If you had a service that relied on socat to bridge a Unix Domain Socket (UDS) to a TCP port, you need a replacement. This post shows how to use systemd-socket-proxyd instead. Why socat was used soci-snapshotter exposes its metrics …

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While prototyping Bottlerocket, I discovered it doesn't recognize additional EBS volumes specified through Block device mappings on Xen. For example, launching the same AMI on t2.medium (Xen) and t3.medium (Nitro) with "DeviceName=/dev/xvdcz": On Nitro, the device appears at /dev/nvme1n1 and …

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When I first moved building Bottlerocket AMI from an EC2 host to AWS CodeBuild, I was hit by a very slow build. On an EC2 instance, I built both the x86 and Arm versions on x86 instances, and fresh builds finished in 5 minutes. However, on CodeBuild with more vCPU and memory, the build process was painfully slower. The …

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There are a few programs we install in Bottlerocket that cannot be built from source. For these programs, we download the binary from a secure repository and install it using an RPM spec like this: 1# foo.spec 2Name: %{_cross_os}foo 3 4Source0: foo 5 6%install 7install -d %{buildroot}%{_cross_sbindir} 8install -D -p -m …

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Bottlerocket is a Linux-based operating system optimized for hosting containers. We use Bottlerocket to run millions of containers each day. There are three key differences between Bottlerocket and common Linux distributions like Amazon Linux 2023: The rootfs is read-only. There is no package manager (e.g., yum) in …

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Bottlerocket is a Linux-based operating system optimized for hosting containers. At my work, we migrated from Amazon Linux to Bottlerocket and experienced the following benefits: Developer-friendly: Easy to understand and fast to build. RPM spec and configuration TOML files are all you need. Every developer can build a …

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