CoreOS

About CoreOS

CoreOS, founded in 2013 by Alex Polvi, Brandon Philips, and Michael Marineau, emerged from the Y Combinator accelerator program with a mission to enhance the security and reliability of internet infrastructure. The founders, friends since their college days at Oregon State University where they started the Linux users group, conceived the company based on the principle of automated operations to address the challenges of keeping systems updated. Polvi's background trended towards product management, while Philips focused on Linux kernel development, creating a complementary leadership dynamic.

The company developed a portfolio of open-source tools designed for modern distributed systems. Its flagship product was Container Linux, a lightweight, open-source operating system based on the Linux kernel, specifically engineered for clustered deployments and running containerized workloads. This OS provided minimal functionality to reduce the security attack surface and featured an automatic update mechanism for enhanced reliability. CoreOS also pioneered other key projects including `etcd`, a distributed key-value store essential for configuration sharing in clustered systems, and `rkt` (initially Rocket), a container runtime developed as an alternative to Docker.

To commercialize its open-source technologies, CoreOS introduced Tectonic, an enterprise-grade platform that packaged the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration system with its Container Linux. Tectonic provided businesses with automated operations and portability across both private and public cloud environments, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and OpenStack. The business model involved selling enterprise-ready solutions and support for its open-source projects, targeting clients ranging from startups to large enterprises like BMW and Ticketmaster who required scalable and resilient infrastructure. Revenue was generated through subscriptions to Tectonic, which was offered for free for up to 10 nodes, and its Quay container registry.

After raising $50 million from investors including Google Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, CoreOS established itself as a significant player in the cloud-native ecosystem. In January 2018, Red Hat acquired CoreOS for $250 million. Following the acquisition, CoreOS's technology was integrated into Red Hat's portfolio, with Container Linux evolving into Fedora CoreOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS. The CoreOS Container Linux project reached its end of life on May 26, 2020, succeeded by Fedora CoreOS.