Announcing the Fedora CoreOS project

[Benjamin Gilbert]

Hi all,

As we’ve previously announced, we’ve been working on plans for a successor to Container Linux under Red Hat stewardship.  We’re now pleased to announce the official launch of the Fedora CoreOS project under the Fedora banner.

Fedora CoreOS will maintain our commitment to the user experience that Container Linux provides today: an automatically updating, minimal, monolithic, container-focused operating system, designed for clusters but also operable standalone, optimized for Kubernetes but also great without it.  It’s also an unparalleled opportunity to revisit some of CoreOS’s early technical decisions, apply lessons we’ve learned over the years, and integrate some of the innovative technology developed by Red Hat and the Fedora community.

We don’t yet know all the details of how Fedora CoreOS will look.  Some of the technologies will change (no one at CoreOS will miss update_engine) and some will not (Ignition!).  We’ll be able to build on the packaging and maintenance work done every day in the Fedora project, while pursuing our own packaging choices and processes where that makes sense.  We’re also excited to join the Fedora community, whose long experience building developer and user communities at scale provides a wonderful opportunity to grow the CoreOS ecosystem.

Meanwhile, we will continue to maintain Container Linux into 2020, and for at least a year after Fedora CoreOS is available.  In-place upgrades from Container Linux to Fedora CoreOS will not be possible, but we will provide tooling and documentation to make the transition as painless as we can.  Existing Container Linux communication channels -- the issue tracker and the coreos-user and coreos-dev mailing lists -- will continue unchanged for the lifetime of Container Linux.

Finally, Fedora CoreOS will serve as the community upstream of Red Hat CoreOS, Red Hat’s new immutable, container-centric operating system bringing automated operations to the Red Hat OpenShift product line.

We’re excited to invite everyone in the Container Linux community to join the new Fedora CoreOS communication channels -- the cor...@lists.fedoraproject.org mailing list, the Discourse discussion board, and #fedora-coreos on freenode -- and help us design and build Fedora CoreOS.

--Benjamin Gilbert

[Michal Kuzak]

Hi Ben,

I have some questions regarding this announcement. Currently CoreOS is a stable production ready OS which is Open Source. No one is running Fedora in Production as Fedora is experimental  by definition. As we all know the stable production grade OS in the Rad Hat family is Red Hat, which needs a licence. So does this mean CoreOS gets killed, and the only production grade alternative is RedHat CoreOS with a paid licence ? If yes, the community will revolt. 

Regards

Michal

[Benjamin Gilbert]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 6:29 AM, Michal Kuzak <michal...@gmail.com> wrote:

Currently CoreOS is a stable production ready OS which is Open Source. No one is running Fedora in Production as Fedora is experimental  by definition. As we all know the stable production grade OS in the Rad Hat family is Red Hat, which needs a licence. So does this mean CoreOS gets killed, and the only production grade alternative is RedHat CoreOS with a paid licence ?

Hi Michal,

Fedora CoreOS is intended to be production grade.  The features/stability tradeoff and update policy of Container Linux are actually closer to Fedora's than to RHEL's.  In cases where we need to make choices different from other Fedora editions in order to obtain the desired stability/features/space footprint/etc., we will have the ability to do so.

Note that the distinction between Fedora CoreOS and Red Hat CoreOS is not the same as the distinction between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  Red Hat CoreOS is focused on the requirements of OpenShift and will not be available as a separate paid product.  Fedora CoreOS will cover a wider variety of use cases, similar to those supported by Container Linux today.

--Benjamin Gilbert