Being an old time OS guy I once made the observation “I think people would pay money to just have drivers and kernel of the OS updated and leave the new features as options."
A buddy told me to check out CoreOS. Why? Because it has the security, service discovery, clustering and updating stuff that guys like AWS haven’t made a priority. I was surprised at Gigaom Structure when AWS’s Werner Vogel said that security was something developers need to work on developing their apps. Google’s Urs Hoelzle said Google thinks there are things they can do to make building secure services easier.
CoreOS makes security #1 priority and many other things that a modern data center group wants.
CoreOS is a server OS built from the ground up for the modern datacenter. CoreOS provides tools and guidance to ensure your platform is secure, reliable, and stays up to date.
Small Footprint
CoreOS utilizes 40% less RAM than typical Linux server installations. We provide a minimal, stable base for you to build your applications or platform on.
Reliable, Fast, Patching and Updates
CoreOS machines are patched and updatedfrequently with system patches and new features.
Built for Scale
CoreOS is designed for very large scale deployments.PXE boot and diskless configurations are fully supported.
Infoworld posts on how CoreOS is a threat to Linux vendors.
Indeed, by changing the very definition of the Linux distribution, CoreOS is an "existential threat" to Red Hat, Canonical, and Suse, according to some suggestions. The question for Red Hat in particular will be whether it can embrace this new way of delivering Linux while keeping its revenue model alive.
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When I pressed him on what he meant by that last sentence, he elaborated:
CoreOS is the first cloud-native OS to emerge. It is lightweight, disposable, and tries to embed devops practices in its architecture. RHEL has always been about adding value by adding more. CoreOS creates value by giving you less [see the cattle vs. pets analogy]. If the enterprise trend is toward webscale IT, then CoreOS will become more popular with ops too.
Project Atomic is a competitor of CoreOS. You can probably look for more choices with the idea that an OS service that just keeps it updated. Updated with what? Bug fixes, performance improvements, and better security. That’s worth a lot.