Red Hat acquires CoreOS

Company’s commitment to containerised programs boosted.

Red Hat, Inc has bought CoreOS for $250 million. In a press release ( http://bit.ly/

core-os), Red Hat says its acquisition of CoreOS “will further its vision of enabling customers to build any application and deploy them in any environment with the flexibility afforded by open source.”

Red Hat was also clear that its main focus with the acquisition was to strengthen its position when it comes to supporting containerised applications. CoreOS, which was founded in 2013, specialised in containerised applications and lightweight distributions, such as Container Linux. CoreOS is also responsible for the Docker-alternative rkt, and CoreOS Tectonic is a Containers as a Service, hybrid enterprise Kubernetes platform. Kubernetes is an open source system for deploying, scaling and managing containerised applications, and Red Hat’s own OpenShift ( www.openshift.com) platform utilises it.

With the acquisition of CoreOS and its various products and technologies (especially Tectonic), Red Hat now has an array of tools for making working with Kubernetes, which is well known for its complexity, much easier to manage. It also puts Red Hat into a stronger position against its competitors, most notably Canonical, whose Ubuntu distro dominates the public cloud, and Docker, Inc, which provides a popular platform for containerised apps. In a statement Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat explains that, “We believe this acquisition cements Red Hat as a cornerstone of hybrid cloud and modern app deployments.”