Red Hat announced that it is acquiring CoreOS, a San Francisco-based startup, for $250 million.
CoreOS builds enterprise-grade platforms ─ CoreOS Tectonic (a Kubernetes platform) and CoreOS Quay (a container registry), which are based on open source software.
CoreOS also offers a lightweight Linux distribution, called Container Linux, which can automate software updates, and is streamlined to run containers. It’s application container engine called rkt, which is an alternative to Docker Engine, was donated to Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), that helped in driving the current Open Container Initiative (OCI) standard.
Red Hat will combine CoreOS’s complementary capabilities with its broad product portfolio to strengthen its leadership position in enterprise container based solutions and upstream community.
“Red Hat and CoreOS’s relationship began many years ago as open source collaborators developing some of the key innovations in containers and distributed systems, helping to make automated operations a reality. This announcement marks a new stage in our shared aim to make these important technologies ubiquitous in business and the world. Thank you to the CoreOS family, our customers, partners, and most of all, the free software community for supporting us in our mission to make the internet more secure through automated operations,” said Alex Polvi, CEO, CoreOS.
An increasingly large number of organizations are moving to hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This move will enable customers to use containers to more easily build and deploy applications across any cloud environment with flexibility, provided by open source.
“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,” said Paul Cormier, President, Products and Technologies, Red Hat.
Red Hat is a leading contributor to Kubernetes, second only to Google, and provides enterprises the Red Hat OpenShift platform – its enterprise Kubernetes platform, to help them embrace container-based applications.
Also read: Introducing microservices disruptive to way organizations work: Red Hat survey
Red Hat said that the acquisition will close in January 2018.
