
Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS - noahl
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acquire-coreos-expanding-its-kubernetes-and-containers-leadership
======
gtirloni
This makes sense. Red Hat has been investing in Project Atomic for a while now
and CoreOS still seems like a better option, if you're looking for a
container-only OS that has been battle tested.

Additionally, both companies seem like good places to work, with leadership
that's often praised and has the results to show. I'm happy for CoreOS on this
one, they're joining a company that I admire.

Looking forward to see how this will impact RHEL8.

~~~
Avshalom
Probably rhel9. I have no professional insight into this but the historic
timeline implies 8 will be out soon, I suspect they are just waiting for
Wayland to get some where they feel comfortable with. Anything past Wayland is
probably a 9 feature.

~~~
bonzini
Atomic Host was introduced in RHEL7.2 if I remember correctly. There's a lot
of room for introducing CoreOS technology before RHEL9, which would probably
be 4-5 years from now.

(disclaimer: working at Red Hat, though not on anything related to
containers).

------
jacques_chester
This is a good move for CoreOS and Red Hat, I think.

I've thought for a while that the platform market would shake out and be left
with one and at most two winners. Previously we saw Deis fold into Microsoft
and now CoreOS into Red Hat.

I expect that Docker will run independently for another few years before their
investors realise it's time to push for an acquisition exit, but it's unclear
by whom. I figure Heptio will go to one of Red Hat, Google or Microsoft.

As for CoreOS's technologies, my guess is that Red Hat will be gently herding
Tectonic and Container Linux users to OpenShift and RHEL respectively. About
the only products I expect to survive fully intact would be Quay and etcd.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we compete with Red Hat and Docker. So read my
remarks with whatever mix of skepticism and mirth you think is appropriate.

~~~
politician
I agree that this is a good move by Red Hat to position themselves with rkt
and Quay ahead of Docker going to Microsoft (who will pay a premium to try to
put this genie back into the bottle)

Given their self-inflicted XHR debacle that dethroned Office, I just don't see
Microsoft passing up this opportunity.

Google, on the other hand, doesn't need Docker to plug any holes in their go
to market unless it's a blocking play. However, Docker is already cozy with
Microsoft, so I don't see a Google acquisition going anywhere.

~~~
zapita
> _this is a good move by Red Hat to position themselves with rkt_

Red Hat does not give a damn about rkt. They care about Kubernetes,
specifically establishing and consolidating a dominant position in upstream
kubernetes development. CoreOS helps them do that.

rkt on the other hand is a dead project and completely useless to Red Hat.

> _Google, on the other hand, doesn 't need Docker to plug any holes in their
> go to market unless it's a blocking play._

Google has a massive hole in their go to market. They have no clue how to sell
to enterprises, and because of that they are falling behind AWS and Microsoft
in the cloud market. However you're right that it would take much more than a
Docker to plug that hole.

Honestly if I were Google I would try to buy Red Hat, or an even larger
enterprise vendor like SAP or Oracle. Not only would they be buying the
enterprise distribution they lack, but they would also secure a major customer
for their own infrastructure and keep up with the economies of scale AMZN and
MSFT are building up. But I don't know that they will develop the humility to
admit that they need that - and even if they do there's no guarantee that the
integration would work... Culturally they are worlds apart.

EDIT: another interesting acquisition target for Google Cloud would be Vmware.
Diane Greene founded it, then got fired by EMC post-acquisition, something I
am betting she still holds a grudge over. Now she runs Google Cloud. If I'm
her, I like the idea of buying the place and savoring a triumphal Steve Jobs
takeover moment. I don't know to what extent this is complicated by this
week's announcement of a Vmware/Dell reverse merger. Maybe they buy the whole
thing? But then would Michael Dell want to run this new mega-Cloud group? And
how does that play with Diane's ambitions? This might bool down to whether
Diane likes the idea of working for Michael Dell. He has vastly more go-to-
market experience which is what matters most in their position.

I really think there should be an HBO Silicon Valley - Enterprise spinoff :-)

~~~
kakwa_
Frankly, I'm not sure why Google would acquire RedHat, SAP or Oracle.

I'm not sure what will be gain from that. Google probably doesn't care about
the softwares these companies provides as it has its own internal
alternatives/derivative and Google is not really a software vendor, so it's a
bit outside of their core business.

What would make more sense in my opinion would be for Google to have a
partnership with a big Enterprise player (or several in fact) and promote it
loudly.

~~~
sah2ed
> What would make more sense in my opinion would be for Google to have a
> partnership with a big Enterprise player (or several in fact) and promote it
> loudly.

They do: they have a Cisco partnership for Google Cloud.

[https://cloud.google.com/cisco/](https://cloud.google.com/cisco/)

~~~
moderation
Cisco's reach beyond the network silo is very small.

------
mankash666
From a financial viewpoint, CoreOs took in an investment of ~$50M [1] and sold
for $250M. Assuming the $50M investment comprised 50% of the equity pool, a
2.5X return on investment isn't too bad.

[1]:
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coreos](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coreos)

~~~
ZiiS
That seems an unlikely assumption. $30M of series B in May 2016 would have
been at around $200M valuation. Given the risks that is a disappointing
return.

~~~
zapita
It's worse than that, their series B valuation was closer to $300M.

Great for the founders, hopefully great for the team, solid for early
investors. Disappointing for latest investors, but shit happens - and the best
investors understand the long-term value of graciously allowing the founders
to follow their heart, even at the cost of a short-term disappointment.

~~~
kaushikt
This is true. CoreOS was doing well and i am sure could grow on their own too.

Why did CoreOS go for this deal though? also, how could the investors agree?

~~~
zapita
They want for the deal because, in spite of doing well on the community side,
they did not go as well on the business side. Enterprise Linux and Enterprise
Kubernetes are very crowded and difficult markets. Being popular with startups
is a big advantage in many ways, but it doesn't pay the bills.

~~~
Terretta
This is important. A startup has to get beyond upstart.

Despite being a ‘buyer’ it was virtually impossible to get traditional
enterprise risk management processes to bet the farm on an upstart OS +
platform.

Now a vendor that enterprise starts to trust can offer this and everyone wins.
It’s just what the doctor ordered for the K8s roadmap at RedHat.

------
tomdec
"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."

So long, Container Linux, we hardly knew ye... ?

~~~
micah_chatt
What is the source? I didn't see that in the linked article.

~~~
tomdec
From their FAQ: [https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-red-hat-acquire-
coreos](https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-red-hat-acquire-coreos)

------
merb
well it would be cool if some of their stuff would be 100% open source than.
Like the CoreUpdate interface.

But well CoreOS is already extremly extremly simple for running k8s and stuff.

We've used CoreOS basically from the beginning. We are small and so had a
fleet cluster with 3 nodes. It worked, kinda but due to docker it wasn't a
nice experience. Docker just had a too fast changing cycle and to much things
didn't worked as we liked.

However now we run more and more internal stuff on k8s self hosted cluster and
it's basically a breeze. we use ignition to bootstrap the nodes and then we
just need to run kubeadm join on every node. everything else is self
configuring.

bootstrapping k8s was basically just 3x kubeadm init. with calico we can even
bgp route every pod and can access them.

the only pain point is storage, but this is not a problem of coreos. small
scale high available disks would be cool, but this is not an easy problem. we
have nfs but it is not on k8s and minio is only good for object storage (and
needs 4 nodes, while I would prefer a solution that uses either etcd or k8s
configmap as a backing store for HA).

Edit: I completly forgotten. Thanks for all what you guys did and I hope you
will be good under the RedHat umbrella.

(P.S.: if tectonic would be free to use for all sizes, that would be even more
amazing, but I'm probably dreaming).

~~~
jacques_chester
Red Hat typically opensources everything, which is one of the things I admire
about them, so you should see repos going up sooner or later.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we compete with Red Hat.

------
grey-area
Not great news if you use container Linux:

[https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-red-hat-acquire-
coreos](https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-red-hat-acquire-coreos)

 _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._

~~~
numbsafari
Super disappointed in this part of it. Is anyone else aware/familiar with a
decent immutable lightweight Linux distro like Container Linux?

~~~
pierrebeaucamp
If you're looking for immutability, I can recommend NixOS. However what is
drawing me to container Linux is mainly its update process

~~~
chrissnell
The draw of CoreOS Linux for me is its curated pairing of the Linux kernel,
Docker, and etcd. There was a commercial entity reviewing upstream changelogs
and making sure that they were pairing components appropriately. I wonder if
an non-commercial district can really get this right.

~~~
zapita
Take a look at Linuxkit by Docker:
[https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit](https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit) .
I didn't develop it, but I use it indirectly via Docker for Mac, which I use a
lot. The latest version supports Kubernetes. This means Docker commercially
maintains a Linux/Docker/Kubernetes stack that needs to run reliably on what I
think is a very large install base. They have open-sourced the system they use
for this, it's called Linuxkit and it's a very cool, underrated project.

------
syvanen
Blog post from Red Hat: [https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/coreos-
bet](https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/coreos-bet)

Red Hat FAQ: [https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-red-hat-acquire-
coreos](https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-red-hat-acquire-coreos)

CoreOS Blog post: [https://coreos.com/blog/coreos-agrees-to-join-red-
hat/](https://coreos.com/blog/coreos-agrees-to-join-red-hat/)

(Added FAQ and CoreOS links)

------
pm90
Red Hat acquired Ansible, now CoreOS. They seem to be really gunning for the
DevOps marketplace.

~~~
emmelaich
And their Kubernetes - Openshift - seems like one of the best options for K8S
with it's extra sauces.

~~~
lima
It is, couldn't be happier as a user.

------
jedberg
Congrats to Alex and his team! I've loved their technology since their alpha
days. Glad to see it working out and hopefully getting into more hands with
the acquisition.

------
mack1001
Congratulations Alex & co for a great exit. I think the price is great
considering that it is pretty much impossible to survive as an independent
company in the infra space.

------
gigatexal
And they say there's no money in open source... ;-)

Anyone want to wager that MS buys Canonical?

~~~
scriptingnerd
This is something I have long thought about. For a long time, I thought they
might set their sights on SUSE as well, but they haven't. I dislike the idea
of Microsoft acquiring a Linux company. Despite my primary current bread and
butter being PowerShell and Windows Servers, I have, in a past life been a
UNIX admin, and would prefer the two camps to remain divided. Microsoft
embracing "open source" cuts both ways in my opinion. They may well indeed
give back, promote GitHub and give away a few trinkets, but they are still the
wolf they were under Ballmer, only now led by a much smarter, more saavy CEO.

~~~
gigatexal
Microsoft is constantly being chummy with Canonical. Coming to Canonical
events — offering the WSL based on Ubuntu, etc. it makes total sense. It’s
such a Microsoft thing to do: they could buy them and then offer them as a
alternative to Windows and still make a ton of money. Or buy them an make WSL
even better and shut everything else down. I really think it’s going to
happen. And if they get flack from regulators they can just point to RedHat

~~~
zaat
They also befriend RedHat nowadays.They partner with them around MSSQL on
OpenShift and RedHat offerings (RHEL, OpenShift) on Azure. They also invite
RedHat to their events, let them have sessions and so on.

I don't think that the warming relationships means anything in the way of
acquisition, what do Microsoft have to gain from such a deal? I think they are
far better to work with them as partners.

------
thedevopsguy
It's all about Openshift. Redhat developers have actively contributed to
Kubernetes for about two years now.

Now they'll own the entire stack and have a great integration story for
enterprises. Even though containers have been around 3+ year's in the form of
docker, corporations still don't have a scooby on how to integrate their
existing deployment and development workflows.

~~~
planar_vector
> Now they'll own the entire stack and have a great integration story for
> enterprises. Even though containers have been around 3+ year's in the form
> of docker, corporations still don't have a scooby on how to integrate their
> existing deployment and development workflows.

I second this. If its a legacy stack, enterprises struggle to fully
containerize their apps and commit to deploying with a container orchestration
layer like OpenShift or Kubernetes. IMHO, we need more enterprises to get over
this barrier, than view it as a passion project by over eager devops' teams...

------
anubhavmishra
This is great news! I am not sure what happens to tectonic? Is is going to be
part of OpenShift?

~~~
jkaplowitz
As per the question in the FAQ about open sourcing CoreOS's technology, we can
assume it's going to become open source, at least:

[https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-red-hat-acquire-
coreos](https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-red-hat-acquire-coreos)

It will probably continue to be available in some paid commercial offering
with well defined releases and lifecycles, as well as a community-supported
free-in-both-senses offering which moves faster. Red Hat repeatedly uses this
model across their portfolio.

Can't answer the OpenShift question - I have no inside info from either
company. But open sourcing it is the bigger impact.

~~~
anubhavmishra
Thanks, I didn't see the FAQ link. Yea, let's see what happens with OpenShift.

------
wowtip
Is this a good technical fit? Is this good for the tech community as a whole?

I am a bit disheartened to see discussions often going in the direction of big
corporation politics / power play, rather than how it benefits the community.

~~~
baldfat
The only thing positive I can say is I MUCH rather have Redhat buy them than
Oracle. I think Redhat has been a positive community member and well I will
invoke the mom rule for Oracle.

~~~
haikuginger
Mom rule == "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all"?

------
michaelsbradley
I suspect an announcement re: Docker's acquisition by a major tech player may
follow closely on the heels of this news.

~~~
fapjacks
I don't think so. Docker Inc seems to want to take this as far as they can on
their own, and I haven't seen anything to indicate a deviation from their
stated and implied goal of becoming an entrenched brand of enterprise
platform. I don't think they've done much in the way of positioning themselves
to be bought, though I'm sure some of the bigger players would like to buy
them. I'm interested in this kind of discussion, though, and would like to
hear all about why I may not be right.

~~~
zapita
I think you're right. CoreOS never made the transition from technology and
community leader to a sustainable enterprise business. I think Docker has made
that transition. They are at a completely different stage than CoreOS and
facing vastly different challenges.

For Docker the question is: can they carve out enough of the enterprise IT
budget to reach IPO-level revenue growth before either A) their direct
competition (Red Hat and Vmware) catches up to them, or B) Big Cloud
commoditizes the entire container platform space, eventually nuking the growth
of Docker, Red Hat and Vmware alike.

~~~
ealexhudson
I'm not sure their direct competition really is Red Hat or VMware to be
honest. Their product is Containers-as-a-Service, which is becoming a table-
stakes service in cloud: everyone offers k8s management at a starting price of
"free".

Docker is in a kind of weird place in the market where they're selling as-a-
service for on-premise. Puts them in the same place as OpenStack and
CloudFoundry for me - the former is already squished; jury's out on the second
(IMHO). I don't see their current strategy succeeding, personally.

------
stmw
Great to see their innovation recognized and hopefully it will become even
more popular & widespread with RedHat's distribution muscle and enterprise
customer relationships.

------
sturadnidge
Congrats to the CoreOS team, although I’m a little bit sad to see this happen
it’s a way better outcome than what happened with RethinkDB!

------
willow9886
A quick D&B search on CoreOS, Inc. shows revenues of ~$550,000 [1], which
means at $250m acquisition price, RH paid ~454X revenues..!

[1] [http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/company-
search.ht...](http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/company-
search.html?term=coreos)

~~~
aberoham
I have personally seen checks cut to CoreOS that were larger than the D&B
number you quote. The set of similar corporate customers we'd run into was
surprisingly vast and diverse. Redhat's made a brilliant move here.

~~~
zapita
I doubt CoreOS has any meaningful revenue (my guess is they are between $5M
and $10M of recurring annual revenue). I also doubt they have a single
customer that isn't either A. already a Red Hat customer, or B. too small to
be interesting to them.

For $250M Red Hat bought outstanding technology, a strong R&D team with
community street cred, and upstream influence in Kubernetes. They know how to
monetize these things. They definitely did not buy revenue or customers. In
fact they got a great price precisely because CoreOS failed to monetize these
things sustainably, and needed a way out. It's a great outcome for the team,
and a great match for Red Hat.

~~~
chrissnell
As someone who used CoreOS in a commercial setting, I think you are spot on.
We wanted to pay them but we were never big enough to afford their commercial
offerings. They wanted a lot of cash for their subscriptions and I think most
would-be customers were looking for something less expensive--basically open
source with support.

Redhat offers an existing and proven enterprise customer base that will cut
the big checks. Redhat customers are the customers that CoreOS always wanted
but likely struggled to acquire.

~~~
greglindahl
So are you predicting a CentOS/Red Hat split for existing CoreOS users, or do
you think existing customers will migrate to something different?

~~~
zapita
Probably a mix. A lot of it depends on how they handle the sunsetting and
migration.

Assuming the industry norm, which is a botched sunsetting and incomplete
migration, the majority of free CoreOS users would go looking elsewhere. And
they would probably scatter to the wind rather than flock to a single winner,
since the OS space is quite crowded and fragmented.

------
wyldfire
It seems like early 2018 is rife with acquisitions and mergers. Was the recent
tax law a factor? Seems like these acquisitions take so much time that it
couldn't have been dependent on that. So why all this activity?

~~~
nikanj
New financial year, fresh budgets

~~~
syvanen
Except Red Hat is financially now in Q4.

~~~
JosephRedfern
End of financial year... budgets to spend?

------
fredland
Long live the Farm!

~~~
arreyder
\o/

------
codergr
What i dont get is why Google ventures gave it ? Perhaps because CoreOS was
based on chromeos and doesnt fit to fuschia OS and the new microkernel ?
Anyways congrats to both RH & CoreOS. RH got passionate people in love with
problem and CoreOS Core team monetised the value and innovation which they
shared openly to the community. Thanks CoreOS team good luck !

------
spraak
Why was "Expanding its Kubernetes and Containers Leadership" removed from the
title here when it is part of the original article title?

~~~
codefreakxff
my two cents: "Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS" is fact "Expanding its Kubernetes
and Containers Leadership" is hyperbole

~~~
jwildeboer
Just some facts: Red Hat is #2 corporate committer (after Google and
"independent") to Kubernetes[1]. With the acquisition of CoreOS Red Hat
engineers now lead or co-lead 15 of the Kubernetes SIGs[2].

Disclaimer: I'm a Red Hatter

[1]
[http://stackalytics.com/?metric=commits&project_type=kuberne...](http://stackalytics.com/?metric=commits&project_type=kubernetes-
group&release=all&lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_detail_base%3BMdxCr4kgQkGZvd7EJdg1fQ%3D%3D)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/openshift/status/958454802605846528](https://twitter.com/openshift/status/958454802605846528)

------
tiuPapa
I started learning about containerization just this week. I didn't even know
there were other popular alternatives to docker. So from what I gather,
coreOS/rkt is an alternative to alpine/docker, with kubernetes instead of
docker swarm as their primary orchestration solution?

~~~
dahidahi1
Calling rkt a competitor to docker would be a stretch. Docker has undergone
really vast improvements since its inception which is not really true for rkt.

------
segmondy
Happy for the team, sad for the product. I've always wondered how long they
would survive for. I was actually afraid they would go out of business.

------
knutster
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ln9RU1PLOA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ln9RU1PLOA)

------
pankajdoharey
Since it has Red Hat in its name now i dont feel like using it anymore. Would
use BusyBox or Ubuntu Core instead.

------
sandGorgon
i wonder if it will mean that coreos becomes the official server-side fedora
to rhel ... and replaces the community powered centos.

~~~
kuschku
The RedHat press release states that RedHat won't maintain any distro aside of
those they previously maintained, which many interpret as that all Core OS
distros are now EOL.

This is painful and sad.

~~~
smarterclayton
The exact quote is “Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s content, the foundation of our
application ecosystem will remain our only Linux offering”

The key point is “content”, which means the packages and kernel. Atomic itself
is only based on RHEL content at the same schedule as RHEL (rpm-ostree and
some of the tooling is the difference). So it’s not quite about Container
Linux the concept being dead, just that Red Hat isn’t going to create a new
packaging stream (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, SUSE are all independent
streams) because then Red Hat would have to duplicate all that work.

I can’t speak to what the plans will be, but the FAQ is not saying Container
Linux is dead.

Disclaimer: Red Hat employee

~~~
kuschku
That's a nice way to talk around the bush, but that doesn't solve the issue
that, without warning or deprecation plan container linux will at some point
just stop working.

There's no timeline or FAQ telling us how we can keep our container linux
deployments, with the same software, with the same configs, working for the
next years.

~~~
smarterclayton
This is the current official message:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/coreos-
user/GR4YlF2c...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/coreos-
user/GR4YlF2c1dM)

We plan to revise and update this as soon as we have plans in place.

~~~
kuschku
Okay, where does that tell me how updates wil continue until you have a plan?
Will they just continue being maintained by CoreOS? Will they stop? What is
happening now? If we'll have to manually migrate, how much time will we get
before we have to? How much time will we get between you announcing a plan,
and it being put into action? When can we expect a plan?

We've got no info, and are supposed to run production systems with that.

This is a corporate acquisition, these things don't happen randomly. Why was
there no plan made ahead of time? I'm disappointed and confused.

------
quotemstr
So CoreOS's claim to fame is that it _only_ runs containers? How is that
useful? You can run containers on any distribution.

~~~
kuschku
Because it does the rest for you, magically.

You mount a config file into the system, but CoreOS on it (or boot per PXE),
and coreOS does the entire rest for you. You never have to install or
reinstall, never have to deal with updates. If you put that config file on any
system with coreOS, it'll be exactly like yours.

This means I can create a config to tell a server to join a kubernetes
cluster, and then whenever I create a new server I simply mount the config in,
and am done. I never have to set up or configure servers. Everything is
handled automatically. No more fighting with Ubuntu wiping all repos 10
minutes (!) after a version is replaced by the successor, never dealing with
misconfiguration.

It's truly amazing, and I loved using it. Going back to normal distros is
painful.

~~~
quotemstr
Ah, I see. So it's basically integrated Puppet, but with first class support
from the configured system

~~~
kuschku
Yes, and this is _fast_. I can spin up a new server, have it configured,
started, updated, and joined to my kubernetes cluster in 12 seconds (!).

And it automatically handles updates across the cluster - only a certain
amount of servers restarts at a time, allowing you to stay constantly up while
handling updates automatically, and potentially scaling out in seconds.

It's sad RedHat EOL'd it immediately.

~~~
op00to
Red Hat EOLd what immediately?

~~~
kuschku
On the question if Red Hat will let container linux continue, the official
answer was

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s content, the foundation of our application
ecosystem will remain our only Linux offering”

TL;DR: container linux, as we know it today, is dead.

------
justinclift
Wondered when that would happen. ;)

------
simonebrunozzi
This should be in the title, by the way: "for a purchase price of $250
million"

~~~
codefreakxff
Why is everyone critiquing headlines?

The essence is that RedHat bought CoreOS. I didn't realize HN was a place
people expected to see purchase prices in headlines.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
I think a headline with the price tag would have simply been more useful. I
had to spend 30 seconds to find it, and that's the main piece of information I
wanted.

------
cdelsolar
sup polvi

