Amazon’s cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the launch of a new open-source operating system designed to run containers on both virtual machines and bare metal hosts.

Called Bottlerocket, the operating system is still in the developer review phase, with anyone interested in testing it out can do so as an Amazon Image Machine for EC2.

As explained on the Bottlerocket website, most customers nowadays run containerised applications on general-purpose operating systems that are updated package-by-package. That makes updates to the operating system tough to automate.

Bottlerocket addresses this challenge by applying updates in a single step, rather than package-by-package.

“This single-step update process helps reduce management overhead by making OS updates easy to automate using container orchestration services such as Amazon EKS,” the company explained.

“The single-step updates also improve uptime for container applications by minimizing update failures and enabling easy update rollbacks. Additionally, Bottlerocket includes only the essential software to run containers, which improves resource usage and reduces the attack surface.”

In a blog post, AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr explained that the new OS supports Docker images, as well as images conforming to the Open Container Initiative image format.

After General Availability, the operating system will be supported for another three years. At launch, AWS boasted a slew of partners, including Alcide, Armory, CrowdStrike, Datadog, New Relic, Sysdig, Tigera, Trend Micro and Waveworks.