SUSE launches MicroOS Container OS

SUSE has released openSUSE MicroOS, a specialized Linux distribution for running containerized workloads. Similar to Fedora CoreOS by Red Hat MicroOS is an "immutable OS" that's not supposed to be altered while it is running. Therefore the root filesystem is mounted read-only. MicroOS still enables OS updates which are transactional and can be rolled back if something goes wrong. openSUSE MicroOS ist using Btrfs snapshots to implement that feature.

Services on MicroOS are supposed to run as containers only. A specialized priviliged container is available for debugging. The installation of the MicroOS base system requires 1 GB of RAM. Additional memory is required for running containerized workloads. openSUSE MicroOS is available as variant of openSUSE Tumbleweed or openSUSE Leap and serves as a base of openSUSE Kubic, SUSE's Container as a Service platform.