Red Hat sets out roadmap for CoreOS integration


Dale Walker

9 May, 2018

Red Hat has released the first details of its roadmap for the integration of the newly acquired CoreOS tools into its existing suite of container-based services.

The open source giant snapped up CoreOS, a highly successful cloud-native startup, for $250 million back in January, a move considered to be Red Hat’s biggest acquisition since its shift in focus towards providing Kubernetes services.

Since then, Red Hat has been silent on what tools the company would formally embrace, however, it has now confirmed that CoreOS Tectonic, Quay and Container Linux will all be integrated into Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform.

Tectonic was originally developed to solve problems associated with managing Kubernetes deployments at scale by introducing automation, supported by much-lauded ‘over-the-air’ updates. Integrated into OpenShift as ‘automated operations’, the feature should make it easier for IT admins to roll out automatic upgrades across their clusters and hosts.

Also making its way into OpenShift is Container Linux, a lightweight operating system providing immutable infrastructure for container deployments, that also benefits from over-the-air updates.

“Our number one principle is that no customer is left behind,” said Ashesh Badani, VP and general manager of OpenShift, speaking at Red Hat Summit. “We want to make sure that all the community interests, all the customers, around Container Linux are supported. We move that forward injecting Red Hat content into that.

“Tectonic was a pretty popular distribution of Kubernetes – customers really liked the fact Tectonic was focused on over the air upgrades, technologies around monitoring and metering. We’re taking all of that and converging that into the OpenShift platform, available over the next six months.”

Quay, a service that acts as a registry for managing container images, will be a standalone product of the OpenShift portfolio, the company confirmed.

Red Hat Quay will be available as an on-premise deployment or through a hosted service as Red Hat Quay.io, and will feature the same tools that made the service popular, including geographic replication, security scanning, and image time machine features.

Badani added that the integration roadmap would be fully delivered to customers by the end of the year, and that incremental progress updates would be provided, the next being at some point over the summer.

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