Red Hat buys CoreOS to jack up containerisation DNA
Red Hat has been out shopping.
The enterprise focused open source platform company has bought CoreOS, a specialist technology player known for its Kubernetes and container-native solutions.
Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications — it works by grouping containers (that go to make up an application) into logical units so that they can be a) discovered and b) subsequently managed.
Why did Red Hat buy Core OS?
Because it wants to champion the “any application deployed in any environment” line much loved among many key tech firms including Microsoft, Oracle and others… and, logically, more containerisation should open the door to more “any” deployment scenarios.
But Red Hat already has a “broad” (its words, not ours) Kubernetes and container-based portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift (an open source container application platform based on top of Docker containers and the Kubernetes container cluster manager), so why does it need CoreOS specifically?
Put simply, Red Hat seeks to acquire CoreOS because CoreOS has a whole heap of hard core container management DNA it it and Red Hat might just want to cross-pollinate (some would say absorb and fold into) some of its own container stack with the capabilities in CoreOS.
CoreOS container DNA
What has CoreOS produced that has gotten Red Hat salivating?
Let’s start with CoreOS Tectonic – this is an open source Kubernetes platform for automated operations that enables portability across private and public cloud providers.
Also in the DNA stream, it offers CoreOS Quay, a container registry.
CoreOS is also a leading contributor to both Kubernetes itself and Container Linux, a lightweight Linux distribution created and maintained by CoreOS that automates software updates and is streamlined for running containers.
Not bored yet? CoreOS is also known for etcd, a distributed data store for Kubernetes; and rkt, an application container engine, donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), that helped drive the current Open Container Initiative (OCI) standard.
Alex Polvi, CEO (for now) of CoreOS has said that Red Hat and CoreOS’s relationship began many years ago as open source collaborators developing some of the key innovations in containers and distributed systems, helping to make automated operations a reality.
Want to be an upstream (i.e. close to distributed source code maintainer/owner) hybrid cloud player with extreme container automation controls across distributed data stores with the power of registry control that feeds container-specific application engines? Well, Red Hat does.