As containers continue to reshape how applications are deployed and managed, bootable containers have emerged as the next frontier—extending cloud-native concepts down to the operating system itself. In this talk, we’ll introduce Bootc and explore how it powers image-based OS deployment, boot integrity, and manageability. By leveraging Bootc, the operating system becomes as portable and manageable as a containerized app, bridging traditional OS management with modern DevOps practices.

We’ll cover "Image Mode" for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora, an approach that allows developers, operations teams, and solution providers to manage the entire OS as a container image. Image Mode incorporates the bootc CLI, the main command-line tool for managing updates and other tasks on end devices, along with the bootc-image-builder, which can generate a variety of image types. These include disk images (such as ISOs) suitable for disconnected installations, and virtual disk image formats like QEMU Copy-On-Write (QCOW2), Amazon Machine Images (AMI), and Virtual Machine Images (VMI). This method not only reduces complexity across environments but also enables a unified DevOps approach, integrating seamlessly with container-native tools and CI/CD pipelines. Attendees will learn how image-based deployments address security needs with containerized scanning, validation, and signing tools, and hear about opportunities for standardization within the container ecosystem to ensure boot and operational integrity at scale.