Flatcar Container Linux is a minimal, container-optimised Linux distribution, which is a direct descendent and spiritual successor of CoreOS Container Linux, which was discontinued and replaced by Fedora CoreOS in 2020.
Flatcar provides a drop-in replacement and plans to continue following the philosophy pioneered by CoreOS, delivering a fully open source, minimal-footprint, secure by default and always up-to-date Linux distribution for running containers at scale.
Recently, Flatcar began building and testing images for deployment on Brightbox and I’m pleased to announce that we’re now automatically importing the latest Stable, LTS and Beta releases as a result.
The images are available now in our image library and integrate with our Amazon EC2-compatible metadata service, so they install your ssh keys automatically on boot and you can ssh straight in as the core user.
Like all of our other official linux distro images, they’re provided completely unmodified from the upstream source, so you can be sure there are no hidden surprises. If your systems work on the upstream images, they’ll work on ours.
We’ve written a guide to help you get started and you should be able to get a new Flatcar server with a basic configuration up and running in a few minutes.
Check out Flatcar’s documentation for more details on the available features and more advanced configuration topics.
If there are other well-maintained linux distros that you’d like to see us offer in the cloud server image library, do let us know.
Of course, if you’re not yet a Brightbox customer, you can create an account in just 2 minutes and get £50 free trial credit to try the new images out.
