An update about Container Linux

[Rob Szumski]

Hi everyone,

As announced on Jan. 30, CoreOS has been acquired by Red Hat. While we included information in the Red Hat FAQ about impact on our projects, we want to clarify what it means for Container Linux.

Container Linux will join Fedora and CentOS as other Linux projects with maintainers from Red Hat. Container Linux was CoreOS's first project to have automated updates and a large part of Red Hat's interest in CoreOS is the expertise in building projects and products that help reduce operational complexity through automation.

An FAQ entry about Container Linux, quoted below, notes that the only Linux OS that Red Hat plans to sell commercial subscriptions for are those derived directly from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Container Linux has always been a free offering and we do not foresee that changing. Red Hat plans to continue Container Linux’s development. In fact, similar to how innovations from Fedora fold into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we may see innovations from Container Linux, like the update delivery mechanism, fold in as well.

Q. How do CoreOS’s products complement Red Hat’s commercial offerings?

CoreOS’s offerings complement Red Hat’s container solutions in a number of ways:

Container Linux and its investment in container-optimized Linux and automated “over the air” software updates are complementary to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host and Red Hat’s integrated container runtime and platform management capabilities. Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s content, the foundation of our application ecosystem will remain our only Linux offering. Whereas, some of the delivery mechanisms pioneered by Container Linux will be reviewed by a joint integration team and reconciled with Atomic.

Rob Szumski

Product Manager - CoreOS

[Andrew Webber]

Hi Rob,

As a longtime CoreOS customer I appreciate your announcement. The twitter storm and press releases did little to calm nervous system administrators, as with the press-release speak, any kind of actionable information was hard to find. Your communication begins to settle nerves.

For me, I think it would be very valuable to communicate road-map transparency over the mid-term, answering migration topics for example:

- Is there the concept of a ContainerLinux end of life and if so what are the migration paths. (Looks like you already answered that question - something explicit or official would be great)

- Is there the concept of a special A/B update in the future that one day means a container linux machine today is suddenly running RHEL instance tomorrow

- Will the techtonic clusters of today be upgraded to some form of OpenShift in the future

- Will I be able to continue to purchase a "commercial subscription" for CoreOS updates in the future. If CoreOS is only free in the future this doesnt answer the topic of Managed Updates.

These all seem like silly example questions but to the ill informed create the basis of elaborate rumors and uncertainty, leaving strategic decision makers with less ammunition to plan and commit to CoreOS products and strategies. For example migrating from fleet to kubernetes was nicely/timely announced allowing in this case over a year to plan the migration. So long as enough notice is given, any migration is possible.

Thank you for your understanding,

kind regards,

Andrew

[vincent.g...@gmail.com]

It would also be good to clarify the futur of less known projects like Matchbox and bootkube which are very important for the Kubernetes ecosystem.

[Rob Szumski]

> Is there the concept of a ContainerLinux end of life and if so what are the migration paths. (Looks like you already answered that question - something explicit or official would be great)

Container Linux will remain open source, so EOL isn't something to worry about.

> Is there the concept of a special A/B update in the future that one day means a container linux machine today is suddenly running RHEL instance tomorrow

No, this would be a huge disruption to folks, and we don't want that.

> Will the techtonic clusters of today be upgraded to some form of OpenShift in the future

We'll communicate info around the future of Tectonic in the coming months.

> Will I be able to continue to purchase a "commercial subscription" for CoreOS updates in the future. If CoreOS is only free in the future this doesnt answer the topic of Managed Updates.

> It would also be good to clarify the futur of less known projects like Matchbox and bootkube which are very important for the Kubernetes ecosystem.

The commercially supported Container Linux offering was the combination of running CoreUpdate within your environment, plus support for the operating system. Red Hat's general strategy around acquisitions is to open source major projects so you can extrapolate based on past actions.

I know this is still light on details, but things will be figured out over the coming months and we'll let you know as soon as we do.

 - Rob

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 5:17 AM, <vincent.g...@gmail.com> wrote:

It would also be good to clarify the futur of less known projects like Matchbox and bootkube which are very important for the Kubernetes ecosystem.

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