Red Hat Acquires CoreOS to Improve Containers and Cloud Platform

Red Hat strengthens their container management and cloud platform by acquiring CoreOS for $250 million.

CoreOS has a few key offerings, including Tectonic Kubernetes platform. This open-source platform provides automated operations while also enabling portability across private and public software. They also offer CoreOS Quay, which is an enterprise-ready container registry.

One of the significant benefits for Red Hat in this acquisition is automated updates. Its Linux distribution makes it easier to keep multiple Kubernetes-managed containers up-to-date. This is particularly useful for large enterprises.

Red Hat’s goal is to accelerate the adoption and development of their hybrid cloud platform for modern application workloads. With this acquisition, Red Hat will be able to reduce attack surfaces on their container images since CoreOS has a smaller footprint. Improving security is more important than ever with attacks increasing in complexity.

Both companies were early adopters of open source container infrastructure and are leaders in the open source container community. CoreOS created and invested in more than 100 open source projects. When Kubernetes was open sourced by Google, Red Hat and CoreOS were already there, improving the container community. Their relationship has existed long before this acquisition. They are both a part of the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Their dedication to open source will certainly not stop with this merger. CoreOS stated in their official press release:

“We have spent the past five years setting up the open source projects that needed to exist to show the power of automated operations. Now, the major technology industry leaders and cloud providers have invested in this ecosystem. Kubernetes is a leading container orchestration tool for organizations of all sizes, on its way to potentially becoming as ubiquitous as Linux.”

Red Hat is the second leading contributor, behind Google when it comes to container open source communities. The combined power of Red Hat and CoreOS will help Kubernetes become as ubiquitous as Linux.