Red Hat Beefs Up OpenShift Automation, Based on CoreOS Acquisition

News Analysis Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading 5/8/2018

SAN FRANCISCO -- Red Hat Summit -- Red Hat is adding muscle to its automation tools for its OpenShift cloud platform, based on technology it acquired when it bought the company CoreOS in January.

"CoreOS focused on 'Day 2' management, operations and services," Joe Fernandes, Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) product marketing manager for OpenShift, tells Light Reading. The CoreOS tools will complement OpenShift's capabilities for running containerized applications. (See Red Hat Buys CoreOS for $250M, Building Kubernetes Muscle.)

OpenShift is Red Hat's cloud platform for running Kubernetes containerized applications on both private and public clouds. "Day 2" refers to operating a cloud platform after it's up and running -- the second day of operations, and beyond.

"That was the motivation to our acquiring CoreOS. We want to bring more automation, so it's seamless to run both Kubernetes and the applications that run on Kubernetes," Fernandes says.

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CoreOS's Tectonic platform competed with OpenShift; now, Red Hat is mining CoreOS for its enhanced capabilities for automated updates, monitoring and usage metering. CoreOS provides an implementation of Prometheus, the de facto open source monitoring and measurement solution for Kubernetes, Fernandes says. Red Hat wants to make it easier to manage Kubernetes deployments at scale, reducing the need for manual administration by enhancing automation.

Red Hat is also adding remote management based on CoreOS technology to push updates over the air, similar to the way phones receive software updates.

Also, Red Hat is adding CoreOS Quay to the Red Hat portfolio. Quay is an enterprise container registry, to track certified images of configurations and applications for quickly deploying and managing Kubernetes applications.

And Red Hat will distribute CoreOS Container Linux, a Linux distribution optimized for running containerized applications. CoreOS Container Linux will be integrated with Red Hat's own, competing product for running containers on Linux, Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.

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— Mitch Wagner Executive Editor, Light Reading