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CoreOS: Linux Vendors in the Crosshairs of Disruption
Linux distribution vendors like Red Hat, Canonical, and Suse are under threat of disruption from a repackaged and streamlined minimalist product from CoreOS.
Cloud providers are intrigued with the technology, and CoreOS is now offered on AWS, Google Compute Engine, Rackspace, OpenStack and VMware.
Traditional Linux distributions have become increasingly bloated as vendors have added ever more features. Matt Assay in an Infoworld article quotes a Linux industry observer as saying that “CoreOS is the first cloud-native OS to emerge. It is lightweight, disposable, and tries to embed devops practices in its architecture. RHEL has always been about adding value by adding more. CoreOS creates value by giving you less.”
CoreOS is designed to be cluster ready and easily maintainable. The ideas behind the CoreOS Linux distribution, which is a fork of Google’s Chrome OS, include:
- Minimalist, consuming less than 40 percent RAM than the average Linux distribution
- Quick updates to new versions, rather than package by package updates
- Docker Containers used by most applications
- Designed for clustering
The easy upgradability is one of the shining features of CoreOS. Patches and upgrades to OSes can be disruptive and difficult. Recent OS vulnerabilities like Shellshock and Xen hypervisor were particularly difficult to guard against because they struck at components of the OS. CoreOS’s design allows the OS to be non-disruptively patched, minimizing headaches related to installing patches.
A year ago, Lew Moorman, former Rackspace president, predicted that CoreOS “is the way a lot of modern applications are going to get built — though it’s very early days. This is not super-mainstream today… but having a lightweight system like this where you can easily manage a huge number of machines will be very, very valuable.”
