Which AMI type was built specifically for containerized workloads?

Hello,

Bottlerocket is purpose-built for running containers, while Amazon Linux 2 will be built for General Purposes. Bottlerocket does offer many features, which makes it a great AMI for running container workloads. By including only the components needed to run containers, Bottlerocket has a smaller resource footprint, shorter boot times, and a smaller security attack surface compared to Linux. A smaller footprint helps reduce costs because of decreased usage of storage, compute, and networking resources. The use of container primitives (instead of package managers) to run software lowers management overhead.

Unless your application has specific requirements for the operating system, hardware architecture (x86 vs. Arm), or Docker version, the ECS/EKS-optimized AMI (Bottlerocket) is recommended for the best performance.