Flatcar Container Linux

Open-source and community-powered innovation with enterprise-grade security, automated updates, and streamlined maintenance for scalable container deployments

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Why Flatcar Container Linux?

Imagine an OS that works as hard as you do—streamlining your container infrastructure while cutting costs, reducing headaches, and safeguarding your business. Flatcar is engineered for those who demand efficiency, reliability, and peace of mind.

Minimal & Focused. Only the essential tools to run your containers—eliminating bloat. No package manager, no configuration drift.

Fortress-Level Security. An immutable, read-only filesystem that drastically minimizes attack surfaces, giving you the confidence to scale without compromise.

Effortless, Automated Updates. Atomic, hands-free updates ensure your system is always at peak security and performance, freeing you to focus on growth.

Made possible by project sponsors including

The Container Infrastructure OS

Flatcar Container Linux is designed from the ground up for running container workloads. It fully embraces the container paradigm, including only what is required to run containers.

Immutable infrastructure

Your immutable infrastructure deserves an immutable Linux OS. With Flatcar Container Linux, you manage your infrastructure, not your configuration.

Designed to scale

Flatcar Container Linux includes tools to manage large-scale, global infrastructure. You can manage update polices, versions and group instances with ease.

Reduced complexity

With containers, dependencies are packaged and delivered in container images. This makes package managers unnecessary and simplifies the OS.

Immutable infrastructure

Your immutable infrastructure deserves an immutable Linux OS. With Flatcar Container Linux, you manage your infrastructure, not your configuration.

Designed to scale

Flatcar Container Linux includes tools to manage large-scale, global infrastructure. You can manage update polices, versions and group instances with ease.

Reduced complexity

With containers, dependencies are packaged and delivered in container images. This makes package managers unnecessary and simplifies the OS.

Secure by Design

Flatcar Container Linux's built-in security features, minimal design and automated updates provide a strong foundation for your infrastructure's security strategy.

Security patch automation

Running the latest security patches is crucial to removing potential vulnerabilities. Flatcar Container Linux’s automated updates does this for you.

Immutable filesystem

By making the system partition read-only, Flatcar Container Linux eliminates a whole class of high-impact security vulnerabilities.

Minimal attack surface

Flatcar Container Linux includes only what is required to run containers. By minimizing the size and complexity of the OS, the attack surface is also reduced.

Security patch automation

Running the latest security patches is crucial to removing potential vulnerabilities. Flatcar Container Linux’s automated updates does this for you.

Immutable filesystem

By making the system partition read-only, Flatcar Container Linux eliminates a whole class of high-impact security vulnerabilities.

Minimal attack surface

Flatcar Container Linux includes only what is required to run containers. By minimizing the size and complexity of the OS, the attack surface is also reduced.

Automated Updates

With Flatcar Container Linux, you'll always be running the most stable, secure and up-to-date Flatcar version by taking advantage of the automated, atomic update feature.

Self-driving updates

Flatcar Container Linux uses the same reliable update mechanism as Google’s ChromeOS to provide safe, secure and automated system updates.

Always up-to-date

With Flatcar Container Linux’s automated updates, you’ll benefit from always running the most stable, secure and feature-rich version of the OS.

Managed updates

The Nebraska update server allows for defining instance groups, assigning update channels and controlling the frequency, time of day and rate of updates.

Self-driving updates

Flatcar Container Linux uses the same reliable update mechanism as Google’s ChromeOS to provide safe, secure and automated system updates.

Always up-to-date

With Flatcar Container Linux’s automated updates, you’ll benefit from always running the most stable, secure and feature-rich version of the OS.

Managed updates

The Nebraska update server allows for defining instance groups, assigning update channels and controlling the frequency, time of day and rate of updates.

Supported wherever you run your containers

Flatcar in Action

Adobe runs Flatcar on over 18,000 nodes in our fleet of Kubernetes clusters across multiple cloud providers and private data centers in 22 different regions worldwide.

Equinix uses Flatcar as the OS for its bare metal cloud control plane, which runs in Kubernetes

Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV)

The largest Norwegian government agency has been using Flatcar since 2021 to run all of their on-prem Kubernetes clusters enabling application teams to become more autonomous and to build better welfare services and deliver them with a higher velocity then before.

Plus Server is using Flatcar as the basis of its managed Kubernetes offering, plusserver Kubernetes Engine (PSKE). As they state in their blog, "Flatcar is currently one of the most popular operating systems for Kubernetes clusters. With its container-optimized design, strong security, and support from an active open source community, it provides an excellent foundation for all container workloads."

Genesis Cloud

Genesis Cloud is using Flatcar Linux as the base for its public cloud offering for instances with GPUs and other accelerators

"We are integrating Flatcar Container Linux, Istio, OPA, Multi-Region, KNative, and so many other technologies..."

"We use Flatcar for our on-prem Kubernetes clusters to run everything from CI/CD to performance-sensitive GPU workloads."

deepl.com

1&1 Mail & Media (GMX, WEB.DE, mail.com)

1&1 Mail & Media is happily using Flatcar as the underlying OS in their large on-premise bare-metal Kubernetes installation, hosting the majority of services for their >40M users.

Digital Science

"We're running Flatcar on all our self-hosted Kubernetes clusters on AWS, used for all data processing behind Dimensions (https://dimensions.ai). We choose Flatcar for security and simplicity."

Skilld.cloud

Flatcar choice was a no-brainer for Skilld: Flatcar is a perfect fit for running Kubernetes workloads. On premise as well as on public clouds. We rely on Flatcar to power up our cutting-edge NRT data-driven ops platforms. A key asset for building distributed & asset management based businesses such as our Community-as-a-service IT platform, or our customers Train fleet's or smart grid's ones.

Wipro Business Solutions uses Flatcar Linux to power their hybrid/multi-cloud PostgreSQL containerized DBaaS platform. Each provisioned database is running on a dedicated lightweight stack with Flatcar Linux as the foundational OS running on each database VM. In addition the DBaaS API itself and all supporting machines use Flatcar Linux as well. Flatcar Linux has proven to be a well-supported rock solid OS with minimal attack surface, built in update mechanism and integrated docker daemon. Ignition brings in an early boot provisioning utility that perfectly adds to the full automation approach of the PostgreSQL DBaaS platform. We use it at scale on-prem with OpenStack cloud but also with public clouds like Google and Tencent

Qualys Gateway Service uses Flatcar Container Linux as a base for its container-based appliance, which is mainly focussed on proxy and caching services, serving other Qualys sensors such as Cloud Agent, Scanner and Passive Sensor. QGS also serves Qualys modules including VMDR, Patch Management, Policy Compliance, EDR, FIM and XDR.

Giant Swarm uses Flatcar within their Kubernetes Distribution. Flatcar is used on all providers (Azure, AWS, Google, OpenStack and Vmware). Giant Swarm manages 100s of clusters with 1000s of nodes running on Flatcar across the planet.

Finleap Connect

"At finleap connect we serve over a million financial transactions per day. As a regulated company using a pure cloud-native stack based on Kubernetes, using Flatcar as our foundational building block for reliable, secure and immutable nodes across the public clouds and on bare-metal deployments was a day one decision we never regretted. Today Flatcar serves all of our 12 production clusters with over 300 nodes on public clouds in 3 countries and on our bare-metal private-cloud setup."

AloPeyk

"We are an on-demand delivery business that every day serves millions of requests on a consistent bare metal infrastructure. None of the common OS could satisfy us for such heavy workloads. Since we migrated our production Kubernetes cluster, nothing can break this solid cluster powered by amazing Flatcar OS."