bottlerocket VS firecracker

Compare bottlerocket vs firecracker and see what are their differences.

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bottlerocket firecracker
42 81
9,267 28,481
1.3% 1.5%
9.6 9.9
1 day ago 7 days ago
Rust Rust
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

bottlerocket

Posts with mentions or reviews of bottlerocket. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-10-23.
  • Access for Infrastructure: SSH
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Oct 2024
    There's not one answer to your question, but here's mine: kubelet and AWS SSM (which, to the best of my knowledge will work on non-AWS infra it just needs to be provided creds). Bottlerocket <https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket#setup> comes batteries included with both of those things, and is cheaply provisioned with (ahem) TOML user-data <https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket#description-...>

    In that specific case, one can also have "systemd for normal people" via its support for static Pod definitions, so one can run containerized toys on boot even without being a formal member of a kubernetes cluster

  • Flatcar: OS Innovation with Systemd-Sysext
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 May 2024
    Don't overlook Bottlerocket, which despite coming out of AWS is not (AFAIK) AWS-centric: https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket#readme

    It's also super handy for writing out static Pod manifests to have replace the brain-damaging Ignition as a less stupid alternative to cloud-init

  • Exploring cgroups v2 and MemoryQoS With EKS and Bottlerocket
    7 projects | dev.to | 19 Feb 2024
    According to this discussion - starting with Bottlerocket 1.13.0 (Mar 2023) new distributions will default to using Cgroups v2 interface for process organization and enforcing resource limits.
  • Boletín AWS Open Source, Christmas Edition
    9 projects | dev.to | 24 Dec 2023
  • Bottlerocket OS
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
  • Bottlerocket – Minimal, immutable Linux OS with verified boot
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Sep 2023
    Well, the link I provided references the Bottlerocket docs which explains the control container and the admin container and also how you can configure Bottlerocket via the User Data field when launching it as an AMI. All the information appears to be in the docs

    https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket/blob/develop...

  • Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Sep 2023
    On the server-side, there's Bottlerocket OS [1] (Amazon). They use A/B partitions for upgrades, and the idea is that you just run containers for anything non-base. Boot containers are used to do custom configuration at boot, and host-container (or DaemonSet, if you run K8S) is used for long-running services.

    [1] https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket

  • RedHat try to kill Centos, Rocky, Alma, Oracle Linux
    1 project | /r/sysadmin | 27 Jun 2023
    Bottlerocket OS.
  • Wolfi: A community Linux OS designed for the container and cloud-native era
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jun 2023
    To add to the other excellent answers, I would recommend adding Bottlerocket to your reading list: https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket#readme

    I'm also aware of (but haven't used) https://github.com/siderolabs/talos#readme

    I just realized your question may have implied a desktop os, whereas Bottlerocket, Flatcar, and likely the others in this specific thread are server-side. I don't have much experience with trying to solve that problem on the desktop except for the horror-show that is snap

  • Compile Linux Kernel 6.x on AL2? 😎
    2 projects | /r/aws | 5 Jun 2023
    https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket/issues/2855 soon for bottlerocket, maybe you’ll see Amazon Linux 2023 for eks nodes soon too?

firecracker

Posts with mentions or reviews of firecracker. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-12-20.
  • Entropy for Clones
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Apr 2025
  • Firecracker Entropy for VM Clones
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Apr 2025
  • Show HN: Ephemeral VMs in 1 Microsecond
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2024
    Well, FireCracker has a jailer process: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...
  • Show HN: Prisma Postgres. Runs on bare metal and unikernels
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Oct 2024
  • Show HN: Desktop Sandbox for Secure Cloud Computer User
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2024
    Hello, I'm the CEO of the company that built this - E2B [0]. We're building infrastructure for AI code interpreting. Companies like Perplexity are using us.

    We're using Firecrackers [1] to power our sandboxes. Funnily enough, we had this repo sitting on our GitHub for about 6 months. We originally made this for one of our customers because they were running evals on the desktop-like environment with GUI for their model.

    You can use PyAutoGUI [2] to control the whole environment programmatically.

    The desktop-like environment is based on Linux and Xfce [3] at the moment. We chose Xfce because it's a fast and lightweight environment that's also popular and actively supported. However, this Sandbox template is fully customizable and you can create your own desktop environment.

    Let me know if you have any questions!

    [0] https://e2b.dev

    [1] https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

    [2] https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/

    [3] https://www.xfce.org/

  • I'm Funding Ladybird Because I Can't Fund Firefox
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jul 2024
    What he said is true, AWS uses Rust heavily in some of AWS core systems https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/why-aws-is-the-best-plac....

    Some of the open source projects you can find are AWS Firecracker https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker and Cloudflare Pingora https://github.com/cloudflare/pingora

  • Lambda Internals: Why AWS Lambda Will Not Help With Machine Learning
    1 project | dev.to | 25 Apr 2024
    This architecture leverages microVMs for rapid scaling and high-density workloads. But does it work for GPU? The answer is no. You can look at the old 2019 GitHub issue and the comments to it to get the bigger picture of why it is so.
  • Show HN: Add AI code interpreter to any LLM via SDK
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Apr 2024
    Hi, I'm the CEO of the company that built this SDK.

    We're a company called E2B [0]. We're building and open-source [1] secure environments for running untrusted AI-generated code and AI agents. We call these environments sandboxes and they are built on top of micro VM called Firecracker [2].

    You can think of us as giving small cloud computers to LLMs.

    We recently created a dedicated SDK for building custom code interpreters in Python or JS/TS. We saw this need after a lot of our users have been adding code execution capabilities to their AI apps with our core SDK [3]. These use cases were often centered around AI data analysis so code interpreter-like behavior made sense

    The way our code interpret SDK works is by spawning an E2B sandbox with Jupyter Server. We then communicate with this Jupyter server through Jupyter Kernel messaging protocol [4].

    We don't do any wrapping around LLM, any prompting, or any agent-like framework. We leave all of that on users. We're really just a boring code execution layer that sats at the bottom that we're building specifically for the future software that will be building another software. We work with any LLM. Here's how we added code interpreter to Claude [5].

    Our long-term plan is to build an automated AWS for AI apps and agents.

    Happy to answer any questions and hear feedback!

    [0] https://e2b.dev/

    [1] https://github.com/e2b-dev

    [2] https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

    [3] https://e2b.dev/docs

    [4] https://jupyter-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/messaging.ht...

    [5] https://github.com/e2b-dev/e2b-cookbook/blob/main/examples/c...

  • Fly.it Has GPUs Now
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Feb 2024
    As far as I know, Fly uses Firecracker for their VMs. I've been following Firecracker for a while now (even using it in a project), and they don't support GPUs out of the box (and have no plan to support it [1]).

    I'm curious to know how Fly figured their own GPU support with Firecracker. In the past they had some very detailed technical posts on how they achieved certain things, so I'm hoping we'll see one on their GPU support in the future!

    [1]: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/issues/11...

  • MotorOS: a Rust-first operating system for x64 VMs
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jan 2024
    I pass through a GPU and USB hub to a VM running on a machine in the garage. An optical video cable and network compatible USB extender brings the interface to a different room making it my primary “desktop” computer (and an outdated laptop as a backup device). Doesn’t get more silent and cool than this. Another VM on the garage machine gets a bunch of hard drives passed through to it.

    That said, hardware passthrough/VFIO is likely out of the current realistic scope for this project. VM boot times can be optimized if you never look for hardware to initialize in the first place. Though they are still likely initializing a network interface of some sort.

    “MicroVM” seems to be a term used when as much as possible is stripped from a VM, such as with https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

What are some alternatives?

When comparing bottlerocket and firecracker you can also consider the following projects:

nerdctl - contaiNERD CTL - Docker-compatible CLI for containerd, with support for Compose, Rootless, eStargz, OCIcrypt, IPFS, ...

cloud-hypervisor - A Virtual Machine Monitor for modern Cloud workloads. Features include CPU, memory and device hotplug, support for running Windows and Linux guests, device offload with vhost-user and a minimal compact footprint. Written in Rust with a strong focus on security.

Flatcar - Flatcar project repository for issue tracking, project documentation, etc.

gvisor - Application Kernel for Containers

setuptools - Official project repository for the Setuptools build system

libkrun - A dynamic library providing Virtualization-based process isolation capabilities

Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video.
Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
getstream.io
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InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
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