Red Hat is, by far, the most popular company known for their enterprise Linux products, especially RHEL. Very recently, Red Hat has acquired CoreOS, a container management startup for $250 million. Red Hat was already making a big play for Kubernetes and containerization with their OpenShift Kubernetes product. By acquiring CoreOS, Red Hat is expanding on that.
What Kubernetes is
Before going further, let’s talk about Kubernetes. It’s an open-source platform designed for automated deploying, scaling and operating app containers. Google started Kubernetes project in 2014 based on their experience with their running production workloads and combining the best-of-breed ideas & practices from the community.
What’s an app container? It’s a specialized platform where apps run and perform tasks, regardless of the host OS. The old method required to recode, rebuild & recompile apps according to the host OS. The container is a small & fast, portable solution based on OS-level virtualization rather than hardware virtualization. The container(s) are decoupled from the underlying infrastructure, thus easier to create VMs. One app can be entirely contained in a container, ensuring the app’s maximum portability and best possible performance, regardless of the host system. Using this one-to-one application-to-image relationship, containers provide the max benefits.
Kubernetes allows you to manage containers easily. Kubernetes provides the following features –
- Portability – portable to any server: public, private, multi-cloud, hybrid etc.
- Extensible – hookable, composable, pluggable & modular.
- Self-healing – auto-restart, auto-scaling, auto-placement & auto-replication.
CoreOS & Red Hat – the relationship
CoreOS is a company who serves products like CoreOS, a Linux distro and Tectonic, a container management solution based on the open-source platform Kubernetes container orchestration, originally created by Google.
Red Hat and CoreOS has been the top 2 contributors to Kubernetes followed by Google, ZTE Corporation, IBM, Microsoft, Mirantis, FathomDB, Huawei, and Fujitsu. By working so closely with Kubernetes, CoreOS and Red Hat created a form of the bond. It makes sense for them to share brainpower and customers together. Both companies provided competitive container focused Linux distros – CoreOS Container Linux and Red Hat Atomic.
The future
It’s most likely that the future generation of software is going to be on the hybrid cloud platform – part of it in data centers and other parts in the public cloud. For that age, cloud-native fabric for delivering apps in a single way will be very critical. According to Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s president of products and technologies noted that the combined companies will provide a powerful way to span environments. CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi said that their company helped in the creation of a whole new category of the platform.
CoreOS was very successful all by itself, raising $50 million since its go-off in 2013. The deal is most likely complete in January 2018. With their joint venture, we hope to see a whole new era of cloud computing and web platform.
