Red Hat Acquires CoreOS to Bolster Its Containerisation Efforts

Expanding its presence in the world of containerisation, Red Hat has announced the acquisition of CoreOS, the container management startup that has been renowned for its CoreOS Tectonic, for $250 million (roughly Rs. 1,600 crores). The new deal is not only likely to help the North Carolina-headquartered company that is dominating the open source market but would also eventually give a boost to the existing enterprise-grade containerised infrastructure. CoreOS is also popular for developing Container Linux, which is a dedicated platform for containerised apps. The operating system shares foundations with Google's Chromium OS and Chrome OS in addition to leveraging modular Linux distribution Gentoo Linux. Having said that, the core interest of the acquired company lies within Kubernetes that is a modern distributed system designed by Google.

Red Hat is set to combine CoreOS' "complementary capabilities" with its existing Kubernetes and container-based portfolio that majorly comprises of Red Hat OpenShift. Also, the ultimate goal of the acquisition is to let enterprise customers build and deploy their applications in a variety of environments, including various local as well as cloud environments.

"We believe this acquisition cements Red Hat as a cornerstone of hybrid cloud and modern app deployments," said Paul Cormier, President, Products and Technologies, Red Hat, in a statement.

Since its establishment in July 2013, CoreOS is offering its enterprise solutions to a large number of organisations. The Palo Alto-based startup has so far created an invested in more than 100 open source projects other than Kubernetes, for which it is the second largest contributor - it comes just after Google. Further, it was one of the founding members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is incubating community-driven projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, gRPC, and Containerd.

The future of the Red Hat-CoreOS amalgamation is expected to open new avenues for containerised app developments. It will also likely to make the competition tougher for Docker and Microsoft that both are also building their solutions to support containerisation. Moreover, new developments from Red Hat using CoreOS resources are expected to indirectly expand Google's presence in the market of open source enterprise solutions as key CoreOS tools, including Tectonic and Container Linux, are largely backed by Google.