GettyImages 605380733

AWS haslaunchedits own open-source operating system for running containers on both virtual machines and bare metal hosts.Bottlerocket, as the new OS is called, is basically a stripped-down Linux distribution that’s akin to projects like CoreOS’s now-defunctContainer Linuxand Google’scontainer-optimized OS. The OS is currently in its developer preview phase, but you can test it as an Amazon Machine Image for EC2 (and by extension, under Amazon EKS, too).

As AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr notes in his announcement, Bottlerocket supports Docker images and images that conform to the Open Container Initiative image format, which means it’ll basically run all Linux-based containers you can throw at it.

One feature that makes Bottlerocket stand out is that it does away with a package-based update system. Instead, it uses an image-based model that, as Barr notes, “allows for a rapid & complete rollback if necessary.” The idea here is that this makes updates easier. At the core of this update process is “The Update Framework,” an open-source project hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

The link for this article located at TechCrunch is no longer available.