Redhat aquires Kubernetes and Containers company CoreOS

On Jan. 30., Redhat announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc, for $250 million. CoreOS, is a major player in the containers and virtualization area of the corporate server / development world.

According to the announcement, “Red Hat’s 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. By combining CoreOS’s complementary capabilities with Red Hat’s already broad Kubernetes and container-based portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat aims to further accelerate adoption and development of the industry’s leading hybrid cloud platform for modern application workloads.”

According to the Redhat website, when asked the question about what exactly containers are (as many causal users may have no idea), the website says, “Linux containers are technologies that allow you to package and isolate applications with their entire runtime environment—all of the files necessary to run. This makes it easy to move the contained application between environments (dev, test, production, etc.) while retaining full functionality.”

In my own words, Containers are a form of more advanced VM’s, that do not rely on a separate OS for each application / system. You could have four different apps in development, with all their libraries and dependencies, packaged into their own container completely secure and separate from everything else; on the same hardware and same OS, as MANY more containers are also running in the same fashion. Because all of the dependencies, libraries, etc are packaged along, moving your container from one system to another is becoming more and more of a simple process as well.

Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS said, “The next era of technology is being driven by container-based applications that span multi- and hybrid cloud environments, including physical, virtual, private cloud and public cloud platforms. Kubernetes, containers and Linux are at the heart of this transformation, and, like Red Hat, CoreOS has been a leader in both the upstream open source communities that are fueling these innovations and its work to bring enterprise-grade Kubernetes to customers. We believe this acquisition cements Red Hat as a cornerstone of hybrid cloud and modern app deployments.”

Now you: Do you have any experience using containers? What are your thoughts on the acquisition? Let us know in the comments!

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