Are Bottlerocket AMI releases cumulative, or do we need to apply intermediate versions?

[Madhav5843]

Hi team,

I have a question about the Bottlerocket AMI upgrade process:
If I upgrade directly to the latest AMI version (e.g., v1.38.0), will it include all the patches, kernel updates, and feature changes from previous versions (like v1.37.0)?

Or is it required to apply updates sequentially — for example, upgrade to v1.37.0 first and then to v1.38.0?

Just trying to confirm whether each AMI release is cumulative and includes all past changes.

[larvacea]

There is no requirement to move through Bottlerocket versions sequentially. You may launch an instance with the AMI you desire, or in-place upgrade an instance using either the Bottlerocket Update Operator (for EKS) or Bottlerocket ECS Updater (for, as the name suggests, ECS), with any Bottlerocket version you desire. We recommend that you test and qualify a new Bottlerocket version with your workload before deploying to production.

As with most distributions, patches may be removed in later versions for several reasons. They may have been adopted upstream, they may have been subsumed in a later patch, or they may simply have been deprecated and dropped if they were not beneficial. The intention is always that the later release incorporate the improvements introduced in earlier releases.

For EKS variants, there are two versions to consider. Kubernetes and EKS place restrictions on the kubernetes version of nodes relative to the kubernetes version of the control plane. You should consult the EKS documentation to see their recommended process for upgrading an EKS cluster to a new kubernetes version, and the constraints EKS imposes on node kubernetes version relative to control plane version. Within those constraints, though, EKS nodes can run any Bottlerocket release that supports the desired EKS version.