Posted On: Oct 28, 2021

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now adds native support for Bottlerocket in EKS managed node groups in all commercial AWS regions. Most EKS customers today deploy their applications on worker nodes backed by operating systems that are designed for a variety of use cases. AWS launched Bottlerocket, a minimal, Linux-based open source operating system that is purpose built and optimized to run containers. When combined, EKS managed node groups and Bottlerocket give customers a simple way to provision and manage compute capacity using the latest best practices for running containers in production. Bottlerocket is now included as a built-in AMI choice for managed node groups, enabling customers to provision container optimized worker nodes with a single click.

EKS customers can easily migrate their applications to run on Bottlerocket based worker nodes and benefit from an improved node security posture. By moving to worker nodes that include only the minimal set of packages needed to run containers, customers benefit from a reduced attack surface, decreased node provisioning time and improved efficiency as more node resources are allocated to applications. This improves cluster utilization and scale. Managed node groups provides notifications when newer EKS Bottlerocket AMIs are available, enabling customers to more easily update nodes to the latest versions of the software.

To get started, customers can follow their existing workflows for provisioning managed node groups, and simply select Bottlerocket as the AMI type under compute configuration options. Bottlerocket is available at no additional cost and is fully supported by AWS. You only pay for the EC2 instances that you connect to your cluster. Please refer our blog and EKS documentation to get started.