AWS’ Bottlerocket and the Age of the Linux Cloud Distributions

May 8th, 2020 5:00pm by Joab Jackson

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with Deepak Singh, Amazon Web Services’ vice president for containers and open source, and Peder Ulander, AWS general manager for open source, about the company’s recently released Bottlerocket Linux distribution for the cloud.

TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams, TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Episode 116: AWS Bottlerocket and the Age of the Linux Cloud Distributions

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Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services introduced Bottlerocket, a Linux distribution built specifically for cloud use (and tailored even more for EKS). AWS is not the first company to do this — A few years back, CoreOS followed a similar strategy as did Red Hat with its Project Atomic. Red Hat bought CoreOS and rolled it into OpenShift, and the CoreOS project also lives on as the independent Flatcar Linux project. So clearly the idea of a distribution assembled specifically for the cloud is getting some traction. So, we spoke with the AWS folks to find out how they built Bottlerocket and what role it plays within the AWS cloud.

Building Bottlerocket, the AWS team “learned a lot about the operational model, and especially how our customers were managing their fleets. So that played a lot of insight into what Botterocket was doing,” Singh said.

Then, later in the show, we discuss other intriguing podcasts and news posts from the site. These include a frank discussion with Drupal creator Dries Buytaert on why this is the perfect time to launch a startup. We learn about a new project to simplify operators, D2IQ’s Kubernetes Universal Declarative Operator (KUDO). We get a lesson in game theory, and why system security is more like poker than chess. And speaking of games, we delve into Sysdig’s new Cards Against Containers.

Amazon Web Services is a sponsor of The New Stack.

Feature image: Deepak Singh, at the TNS Context Zoom recording.

Joab Jackson is Editor-in-Chief for The New Stack, assuring that the TNS website gets a fresh batch of cloud native news, tutorials and perspectives each day. He has reported on infrastructure IT for over 25 years, including stints at IDG...