As the popularity of containers continues to rise, the scramble to dominate the tooling supporting the technology becomes increasingly busy. I recently wrote a post rounding up managed Kubernetes options and concluded that there were almost too many choices, with companies creating competing platforms and solutions, that in essence have similar functionality.
Today perhaps marked the beginning of the consolidation of the options available, with the venerable Red Hat announcing it was buying CoreOS, the container-focused OS.
Red Hat and CoreOS have had an existing close relationship over the past years, with both companies being members and contributors to the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Red Hat has maintained their own popular Open Shift solution for the past six years, which added a version of Kubernetes in 2014, adding other developer and business-friendly features. CoreOS began as a container-focused company, bringing a suite of tools into an operating system designed for running containers as efficiently and natively as possible. Combining the two platforms will create a powerful solution for developers moving their containers into production that will be hard for other vendors to beat.
Interestingly, CoreOS has always prioritized the Rkt container engine over Docker, and I wonder if this will increase support for the engine in Red Hat products, and Kubernetes services more generally. Or will Rkt find itself pushed out of the way by broader Docker adoption?