Additional CoreOS Funding to Drive Enterprise Container Adoption
Now that CoreOS has announced that it has picked up and additional $28 million in financing the company plans to pay more attention to making microservices environments built on top of the Kubernetes container orchestration framework truly enterprise class.
By way of example at a CoreOS Fest event in Berlin this week CoreOS announced it is working with Tigera, which lead the development of an open source Project Calico policy management engine, with the flannel networking software created by CoreOS to create a new Canal project designed to make it simpler to manage and deploy distributed container applications across a network.
At the same time, CoreOS also revealed it is working with StackPointCloud and Packet to create an IT automattion tool that builds Kubernetes clusters on top of processors that are enabled with the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) module defined by the Distributed Trusted Computing (DTC) consortium. The tool will enable IT organizations to automate the deployment of Kubernetes whether they use Tectonic or TPM or not.
Finally, in collaboration with Intel there was a live demonstration of the Stacknetes platform that CoreOS is building to deploy the OpenStack cloud management framework on top of Kubernetes. That project is intended to help spur adoption of Kubernetes at a time when adoption of OpenStack inside enterprise IT organizations with IT engineering experience is starting to gain momentum in its own right.
In general, CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi says from here on out CoreOS will be more focused on making the container technologies it helps build robust enough to support applications in the enterprise. A big part of that effort will focus on integrating Google Infrastructure for Everyone Else (GIFEE) with a broad range of third party products and services.
In addition, Polvi says CoreOS will also be investing more dollars in sales and marketing efforts intended to establish relationships with enterprise IT organizations looking for long term support. Besides Tectonic, those CoreOS offerings include the Quay container registry; CoreOS Linux; etcd, a distributed, key-value store; rkt, the container engine alternative to Docker; and Clair, the container image security analyzer.
Obviously, as CoreOS expands its ambitions beyond simply providing enabling technologies the more intense the competition with both Docker Inc. and a host of traditional enterprise vendors will become. While many of those enterprise IT organizations tend to wary of smaller vendors, many of them have already expressed their concerns about getting locked into one container technology or another. As such, many of those same IT organizations are expressed their support for emerging container standards that CoreOS has played a significant role in bring about. The degree to which CoreOS receives credit for those efforts in terms of actual enterprise IT contracts remains to be seen.
But with backing from Intel Capital and GV (formerly Google Vetures) it’s clear that the amount of funding flowing into CoreOS should make it at the very least a significant part of an elaborate checks and balance system surrounding the development of containers for some time to come.
