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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We run a container platform. For privacy and security reasons, we do not collect kernel logs because customer workloads use the same kernel as the host and kernel messages can contain sensitive customer data, such as command-line arguments surfaced in audit logs. However, we recently hit a blind spot: foo.service was …

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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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I recently debugged a resource leak where a systemd service kept restarting while leaving a process behind after each restart. The root cause isn't particularly interesting: a backward-incompatible third-party dependency upgrade. But the debugging process and lessons learned are. Thousands of zombie processes from a …

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I recently debugged a mysterious latency issue: after migrating a systemd service from path-activation to socket-activation, there was a consistent ~1 second time-to-available latency. The culprit was a bad practice—starting the daemon program as a new process in socket-activation. Let's dive into the details. Starting …

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A bug caused around 0.5% of container workloads to fail to start during load test. This post walks through the bug and its fix, an interesting mix of Linux namespaces, Go concurrency, and syscalls. The need to run a program in its own network namespace and mount namespace soci-snapshotter is an open-source containerd …

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In Detect and fix rare cases where the primary ENI does not serve default traffic , we used IMDS "meta-data/mac" to get the primary ENI's MAC address. However, we encountered the following errors in 0.5% of EC2 ARM instance launches: 1failed to get IMDS /mac: operation error ec2imds: GetMetadata, exceeded …

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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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