If you're using an ECS or EKS Cluster, you still have to run some operating system on the ECS Container Instances. The containers have to run somewhere.
There are a variety of options currently, including one from Amazon, but Bottlerocket seems designed to be a next-generation OS for container instances. It's extremely minimal, and designed to be as secure as possible, with transactional automatic updates.
Ideally, I would just deploy Bottlerocket as the underlying OS on my ECS Cluster, and then never have to actually do any management of the Instance OSes whatsoever. I would deploy containers on top of my ECS Cluster, Bottlerocket would keep itself up to date and secure, and my containers would live happily ever after. It would hopefully feel more similar to using Fargate than not, except without paying the higher price for Fargate, and having access to the wider variety of hardware configurations available to regular ECS.
Amazon has specifically said this in the Bottlerocket repo:
> Bottlerocket is architected such that different cloud environments and container orchestrators can be supported in the future.
It's mainly useful in concert with ECS or EKS right now, but it is architected to be useful in other places as well.
I'm excited about Bottlerocket as a project, and I'm glad it's open source instead of just an opaque AMI that you can use on ECS or EKS.
> It's mainly useful in concert with ECS or EKS right now, but it is architected to be useful in other places as well.
Right, this is the big question. If a community forms to support Bottlerocket off of AWS, then that's one thing, but until then, it basically just seems like a better option for ECS or EKS.
>>> I'm not entirely sure who they built it for, except as a foundational component for AWS's managed offerings.
>> <snip>
> If a community forms to support Bottlerocket off of AWS, then that's one thing, but until then, it basically just seems like a better option for ECS or EKS.
I'm failing to see why that's a problem or a source of confusion. There's a clearly defined market of "who they built it for", and there's a community option to expand Bottlerocket's target market.
The code is open source, so anyone could fork Bottlerocket and modify it to suit their needs immediately. Will Bottlerocket see success beyond ECS and EKS? Only time will tell... literally no one knows yet.
> If you're using an ECS or EKS Cluster, you still have to run some operating system on the ECS Container Instances. The containers have to run somewhere.
I literally mentioned Fargate in the same comment:
>> It would hopefully feel more similar to using Fargate than not, except without paying the higher price for Fargate, and having access to the wider variety of hardware configurations available to regular ECS.
If you're using an ECS Fargate Cluster or EKS Fargate Cluster, I don't consider those the same as an ECS Cluster or EKS Cluster. Unfortunately, there's no specific term commonly used for non-Fargate Clusters that I know of. AWS offers ECS Clusters and ECS Fargate Clusters.
If you were legitimately confused by my comment, I’m sorry. I could have said "non-Fargate" repeatedly, if it would have helped, but I thought the context made things clear, especially with the additional explicit mention of Fargate as a separate thing.
There are a variety of options currently, including one from Amazon, but Bottlerocket seems designed to be a next-generation OS for container instances. It's extremely minimal, and designed to be as secure as possible, with transactional automatic updates.
Ideally, I would just deploy Bottlerocket as the underlying OS on my ECS Cluster, and then never have to actually do any management of the Instance OSes whatsoever. I would deploy containers on top of my ECS Cluster, Bottlerocket would keep itself up to date and secure, and my containers would live happily ever after. It would hopefully feel more similar to using Fargate than not, except without paying the higher price for Fargate, and having access to the wider variety of hardware configurations available to regular ECS.
Amazon has specifically said this in the Bottlerocket repo:
> Bottlerocket is architected such that different cloud environments and container orchestrators can be supported in the future.
It's mainly useful in concert with ECS or EKS right now, but it is architected to be useful in other places as well.
I'm excited about Bottlerocket as a project, and I'm glad it's open source instead of just an opaque AMI that you can use on ECS or EKS.