This document describes what Bottlerocket variants are and how they are built.
In the Background section, we discuss the motivation for variants.
In the Variants section, we list the variants that exist today.
In the Development section, we provide a short guide for adding a new variant.
Bottlerocket is purpose-built for hosting containers. It can run one of several container orchestrator agents. It is also image-based and does not include a package manager for customization at runtime.
Conceptually, each image could include all orchestrator agents, but that would conflict with our design goals. We want to keep the footprint of Bottlerocket as small as possible for security and performance reasons. Instead, we make different variants available for use, each with its own set of software and API settings.
A variant is essentially a list of packages to install, plus a model that defines the API. The documentation for packages covers how to create a package. Information about API settings for variants can be found in the models documentation.
The aws-k8s-1.17 variant includes the packages needed to run a Kubernetes node in AWS. It supports self-hosted clusters and clusters managed by EKS.
This variant is compatible with Kubernetes 1.17, 1.18, and 1.19 clusters.
The aws-k8s-1.18 variant includes the packages needed to run a Kubernetes node in AWS. It supports self-hosted clusters and clusters managed by EKS.
This variant is compatible with Kubernetes 1.18, 1.19, and 1.20 clusters.
The aws-k8s-1.19 variant includes the packages needed to run a Kubernetes node in AWS. It supports self-hosted clusters and clusters managed by EKS.
This variant is compatible with Kubernetes 1.19, 1.20, and 1.21 clusters.
The aws-k8s-1.20 variant includes the packages needed to run a Kubernetes node in AWS. It supports self-hosted clusters and clusters managed by EKS.
This variant is compatible with Kubernetes 1.20, 1.21, and 1.22 clusters.
The aws-k8s-1.21 variant includes the packages needed to run a Kubernetes node in AWS. It supports self-hosted clusters and clusters managed by EKS.
This variant is compatible with Kubernetes 1.21, 1.22, and 1.23 clusters.
The aws-ecs-1 variant includes the packages needed to run an Amazon ECS container instance in AWS.
The aws-dev variant has useful packages for local development of the OS. It includes tools for troubleshooting as well as Docker for running containers. User data will be read from IMDS.
The vmware-dev variant has useful packages for local development of the OS, and is intended to run as a VMware guest. It includes tools for troubleshooting as well as Docker for running containers. User data will be read from a mounted CD-ROM (from a file named "user-data" or from an OVF file), and from VMware's guestinfo interface. If user data exists at both places, settings read from guestinfo will override identical settings from CD-ROM.
The vmware-k8s-1.20 variant includes the packages needed to run a Kubernetes worker node as a VMware guest. It supports self-hosted clusters. User data will be read from a mounted CD-ROM (from a file named "user-data" or from an OVF file), and from VMware's guestinfo interface. If user data exists at both places, settings read from guestinfo will override identical settings from CD-ROM.
This variant is compatible with Kubernetes 1.20, 1.21, and 1.22 clusters.
The vmware-k8s-1.21 variant includes the packages needed to run a Kubernetes worker node as a VMware guest. It supports self-hosted clusters. User data will be read from a mounted CD-ROM (from a file named "user-data" or from an OVF file), and from VMware's guestinfo interface. If user data exists at both places, settings read from guestinfo will override identical settings from CD-ROM.
This variant is compatible with Kubernetes 1.21, 1.22, and 1.23 clusters.
The aws-k8s-1.15 variant included the packages needed to run a Kubernetes node in AWS. It supported self-hosted clusters and clusters managed by EKS.
This variant was compatible with Kubernetes 1.15, 1.16, and 1.17 clusters. It reached end-of-life on May 3, 2021.
Upstream support for Kubernetes 1.15 has ended and this variant will no longer be supported in Bottlerocket releases.
The aws-k8s-1.16 variant included the packages needed to run a Kubernetes node in AWS. It supported self-hosted clusters and clusters managed by EKS.
This variant was compatible with Kubernetes 1.16, 1.17, and 1.18 clusters. It reached end-of-life on July 25, 2021.
Upstream support for Kubernetes 1.16 has ended and this variant will no longer be supported in Bottlerocket releases.
Say we want to create my-variant, a custom build of Bottlerocket that runs my-agent.
This listing shows the directory structure of our sample variant.
variants/my-variant
├── Cargo.toml
├── build.rs
└── lib.rs
Each variant has a Cargo.toml file that lists the packages to install.
It also includes a build.rs build script which tells Cargo to invoke our buildsys tool.
Artifacts for the variant are built as a side effect of Cargo running the script.
It has an empty lib.rs for the actual crate, since Cargo expects some Rust code to build.
Our sample variant has the following manifest.
[package]
name = "my-variant"
version = "0.1.0"
edition = "2018"
publish = false
build = "build.rs"
[package.metadata.build-variant]
included-packages = [
"release",
"my-agent",
]
[lib]
path = "lib.rs"
[build-dependencies]
"my-agent" = { path = "../../packages/my-agent" }
"release" = { path = "../../packages/release" }
The package.metadata table is ignored by Cargo and interpreted by our buildsys tool.
It contains an included-packages list which specifies the packages to install when building the image.
In the [build-dependencies] section, we specify the packages that need to be built, which is sometimes slightly different than included-packages.
This populates the Cargo build graph with all of the RPM packages that need to be built before the variant can be constructed.
Variants should almost always include the release package.
This pulls in the other core packages and includes essential configuration and services.
Be sure to include publish = false for all packages, as these are not standard crates and should never appear on crates.io.
We use the same build script for all variants.
use std::process::{exit, Command};
fn main() -> Result<(), std::io::Error> {
let ret = Command::new("buildsys").arg("build-variant").status()?;
if !ret.success() {
exit(1);
}
Ok(())
}
If you need a build script with different behavior, the recommended approach is to modify the buildsys tool.
The package.metadata table can be extended with declarative elements that enable the new feature.
We use the same Rust code for all variants.
// not used
To build your variant, run the following command in the top-level Bottlerocket directory.
cargo make -e BUILDSYS_VARIANT=my-variant
This will build all packages first, not just the ones needed by your variant.