Goals | Bootable Container Images
Over the last decade, OCI containers have become a de facto way to deploy a complete functioning Linux user space as an application. A large set of practices and tooling have evolved around them. Bootable containers are a modern opinionated way of deploying, configuring and managing immutable image based Linux systems.
Use standard container practices and tooling, such as the OCI standard, layering, container registries, signing, testing, and GitOps workflows to build Linux systems.
Container images describe the operating system behavior as a prebuilt predefined unit, rather than defined during deployment out of fine grained packages. There is a strong bias toward having the full system definition committed to version control, including a list of components, application files and system configuration. This bias helps implement the concept of a more composable operating system.
The system updates atomically. It is robust to power outages or software failures during updates. The system either uses the contents of the old system, or the new image; Never some combination of both.
