Bottlerocket bare metal images for EKS Anywhere

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When EKS Anywhere launched bare metal support in 2022, Bottlerocket was included as the default operating system for nodes in EKS Anywhere clusters to enable a streamlined getting started experience. Since, we have learned that most EKS Anywhere customers running on bare metal have unique hardware and networking configurations that require OS-level customizations and driver support. Bottlerocket's image-based architecture and constrained surface area do not align with these bare metal use cases, and most EKS Anywhere customers running on bare metal have chosen to use Ubuntu or RHEL as the operating system for nodes in their EKS Anywhere clusters.

Starting with the v0.19 EKS Anywhere release, we are deprecating Bottlerocket support for bare metal and it will no longer be the default operating system for EKS Anywhere on bare metal. The EKS Anywhere v0.19 release does not include Bottlerocket bare metal images for Kubernetes version v1.29. Bottlerocket bare metal images for the older Kubernetes versions supported by EKS Anywhere (v1.25 - v1.28) will continue to be maintained and patched until the Kubernetes version reaches end of support in EKS Anywhere. We recommend that you consider Ubuntu or RHEL for EKS Anywhere on bare metal as alternatives. For more information, reference the EKS Anywhere documentation.

Bottlerocket support for EKS Anywhere on vSphere are unaffected by this change.

If you have feedback on this change, please respond to this issue.