Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced the debut of a new, open-source operating system for software containers that runs on bare metal servers or virtual machines.

AWS Bottlerocket is currently available in preview, and is a stripped down operating system comprised of only the components that are absolutely essential to get containers up and running. It supports both Docker images and others that conform to the Open Container Initiative or OCI image format.

Software containers are popular among developers because they can be used to host applications that can run on many different kinds of computing infrastructure without making changes to their underlying code.

But software containers need a host operating system, and the vast majority run on general-purpose OS systems that were never designed for that purpose. Most of these are updated package-by-package, which means it’s a tricky task to automate, AWS evangelist Jeff Barr said in a blog post announcing Bottlerocket.

Updates to operating systems are therefore not just slow but also cause security problems by increasing the attack surface, Barr said. In addition, updates can be problematic and error prone, and inconsistencies with packages can slowly damage the integrity of container clusters over time.

It’s for those reasons that Amazon has come up with Bottlerocket, which can be updated in a single step rather than package-by-package. The idea is to make it easier for users to automate updates to the OS via container orchestration services such as Amazon EKS.

“Instead of a package update system, Bottlerocket uses a simple, image-based model that allows for a rapid & complete rollback if necessary,” Barr said. “This removes opportunities for conflicts and breakage, and makes it easier for you to apply fleet-wide updates with confidence using orchestrators such as EKS.”

In addition, the single-step update also helps to boost update for container apps by minimizing update failures and enabling easier rollbacks should any problems occur, he said.

“The race is on to make container operations and monitoring as simple and efficient as possible,” said Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc. “Bottlerocket is primed to make container operations easier for enterprises,” he added, depending on interest and uptake by customers.

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