17 ms·

End-of-Life Announcement for CoreOS Container Linux

180 points by thebeardisred 7y ago

captn3m0 7y ago
Interesting that they are yanking AMIs on 1st Sep. > New CoreOS Container Linux machines will not be launchable in public clouds without prior preparation. Are people here moving to FlatCar or Fedore CoreOS?
- secure 7y ago
  FlatCar. I’m using coreos-cloudinit for configuration, and that seems to be deprecated with no proper replacement.
vlowther 7y ago
well, good thing there is https://www.flatcar-linux.org/ https://www.flatcar-linux.org/
- astrea 7y ago
  > In fact, if CoreOS Container Linux disappeared tomorrow, it would have very little impact on the Flatcar Container Linux project. Well we will learn how true this is very shortly.
  - blixtra 7y ago
    Chris from Kinvolk here. Our Flatcar builds are already completely independent of CoreOS builds. This is quite exciting for us as we can finally start updating the included software versions. We've been doing this a while for the edge channel (https://www.flatcar-linux.org/releases/ https://www.flatcar-linux.org/releases/) and have been waiting to do that with the other channels.
    - merb 7y ago
      it would be cool if https://github.com/coreos/container-linux-update-operator https://github.com/coreos/container-linux-update-operator would also be part of flatcar.
zymhan 7y ago
Fedora CoreOS seems like it has some pretty significant restrictions > It does not yet include native support for Azure, DigitalOcean, GCE, Vagrant, or the Container Linux community-supported platforms. > The rkt container runtime is not included. > Fedora CoreOS provides best-effort stability, and may occasionally include regressions or breaking changes for some use cases or workloads.
- wmf 7y ago
  This is the Red Hat "stay in business" business model, not the CoreOS "make it up in volume" business model.
  - bdutta 7y ago
    Or IBM
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    How is breaking compat good for business?
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  >> The rkt container runtime is not included. rkt is dead
  - c0restraint 7y ago
    It is? The GitHub project page does not indicate that: https://github.com/rkt/rkt/ https://github.com/rkt/rkt/
    - wmf 7y ago
      It's really dead. rkt never got much adoption and now Red Hat is promoting Podman instead.
      - stingraycharles 7y ago
ollien 7y ago
I mean this makes sense, right? Fedora Silverblue exists. Or are they totally separate products?
- wwright 7y ago
  Silverblue is an effort to bring this technology to the desktop AFAICT. Fedora Atomic Server uses some of the technology for server workloads, but maintains some traditional structure and architecture. CoreOS is intended to be a “new” architecture for servers if I am not mistaken. I may be :-)
  - hosh 7y ago
    CoreOS was built using Gentoo / ChromeOS / Chromium OS family. There is a minimum set of services to run containers. Rootfs is read-only. Updates are done atomically by updating the standby rootfs, and the swapped at boot. There is no package manager. You bring everything else with images and containers. If tools are not found on the distro, you have to get them yourself by starting up an image that contains those tools. The build system that builds a new release is Gentoo. All the packages that are there gets updated, though the final release does not contain emerge or anything that actually can compile or build anything. After CoreOS got bought out by Redhat, they started porting over those ideas using the Fedora build system (so Redhat packages, yum, etc). I think the CoreOS Container OS will live on inside GCP as the customized container os as the default distro used on GKE (managed Kubernetes). Edit: I see someone mention FlatCar. Neat. I guess that is more of a successor project than the one used in GKE.
    - bogomipz 7y ago
      >"I think the CoreOS Container OS will live on inside GCP as the customized container os as the default distro used on GKE (managed Kubernetes)." I found this interesting. Does anyone have any insights how or why Google ended up choosing CoreoS for their GKE offering?
      - robszumski 7y ago
bovermyer 7y ago
What about RancherOS? Is that a viable replacement?
- ShakataGaNai 7y ago
  I'm surprised more people aren't mentioning RancherOS. It's a great "Docker Only" OS, like many of the other options mentioned. It doesn't have the market that CoreOS did, that's for sure, but still a great tool. It's tiny and being actively updated. Plus it's got good RPi support for all those serious Big Software Company deployments /s
fkistner 7y ago
Can someone recommend an immutable Linux distro, which offers auto-updates out-of-the-box and supports arm64 on RPi? Have been searching for something like this for a while for a personal project, but unfortunately neither Flatcar nor Fedora CoreOS seem to support arm64, RancherOS does not to seem to offer fully automatic updates.
- choward 7y ago
  I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "immutable" but you might find NixOS (https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/) interesting. However, it might not be the best experience at the moment for the Raspberry Pi 4 (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/63720 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/63720).
- infinisil 7y ago
  As choward already mentioned, I think NixOS is a very good choice: aarch64 is decently well supported with a bunch of people running NixOS on their Raspbys, and cross compilation support is really good too if needed. See https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM/Raspberry_Pi https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM/Raspberry_Pi for more info, or hop into #nixos and/or #nixos-aarch64 on Freenode for help
- Conan_Kudo 7y ago
  The ARM version of Fedora CoreOS is just known as the Fedora IoT Edition: https://iot.fedoraproject.org/ https://iot.fedoraproject.org/ It's slimmer and more tuned for AArch64 and SBC type systems.
crad 7y ago
Yet another instance of RedHat buying something I used/liked and killing it off and offering a shitty alternative. And yet another reason I've tried to avoid giving RedHat money over the last 20+ years.
- quasse 7y ago
  I'm especially sad since I finished porting some of our Docker infrastructure to CoreOS today. I guess I missed the proverbial writing on the wall. Thank god Flatcar Linux looks to be a viable alternative and easy changeover.
  - dharmab 7y ago
    How did you miss the announcement back in July? https://fedoramagazine.org/introducing-fedora-coreos/ https://fedoramagazine.org/introducing-fedora-coreos/
  - pepemon 7y ago
    You have the stable release of Fedora CoreOS now.
- pepemon 7y ago
  What product have RH killed after acquisition?
qwerty456127 7y ago
Fedora CoreOS. Oh my. I din't even know Fedora Core is not the full name of the ordinary Fedora OS any more...
- pepemon 7y ago
  12 years have passed. Glad that you woke up.
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    I still don't feel like Fedora CoreOS is a good name choice for a new OS distinct from what used to be named Fedora Core. Perhaps they could name it after another kind of hat or something.
rubyn00bie 7y ago
What did CoreOS offer that say ClearLinux, or good ol' Debian do not? It seems like the only difference is you've gottta `packagemanger_xyz install` a couple packages...?
- forkexec 7y ago
  There was no native userland. You picked an userland and it ran in a container along with /etc and other mounts. The idea being that the OS itself should be separate, developed as a whole and immutable like an appliance OS like FreeNAS, XenServer or VMware ESXi. For ops lifecycle supportability (installs, upgrades, downgrades, etc.), keeping the OS immutable has a lot of advantages in the "system entropy" department because users and admins can't corrupt the OS itself as easily, can replace it more easily and it's far easier for itself to run HIDS against. If it I were developing an immutable OS, there would be a hidden volume containing signed squashfs volumes and updates would be delta overlays that could be merged when the older base volume is no longer needed. Another interesting Linux distro that uses virtualization rather merely containers to isolate system components for security is Qubes OS. Really, I think any new Linux distros should: 1. be developed as an immutable whole 2. run most system and user-added services in containers 3. have package collections like nix or habitat that don't have dependency hells 4. make service and configuration management easy 5. not reinvent the wheel without specific goals and niche/s to occupy that are better than what came before 6. do damn good jobs of smoothing package rough edges, upstreaming patches and rapidly releasing security fixes (including ksplice/kpatch) 7. least surprise everywhere 8. think carefully about whether to go systemd or s6/runit/daemontools 9. manage logs better, preferably without local text files, streamed across a distributed system that scales like flume or kafka
- dharmab 7y ago
  My team at a Very Large Software Company runs CoreOS for two main reasons: 1. Reduced attack surface due to a very slim OS with no package manager. 2. CoreOS Ignition, a killer app OS provisioning/customization tool. No weird barely-documented kickstart scripts, and no long build and upload times for OS images. We can make changes/customizations to our OS and have them deployed in a cloud within literally minutes. We consider this a competitive advantage.
merb 7y ago
stuff that is happening with CoreOS is a complete NIH show. it's really akward what they are doing.

180 points by thebeardisred 7y ago

Interesting that they are yanking AMIs on 1st Sep. > New CoreOS Container Linux machines will not be launchable in public clouds without prior preparation. Are people here moving to FlatCar or Fedore CoreOS?

secure 7y ago
FlatCar. I’m using coreos-cloudinit for configuration, and that seems to be deprecated with no proper replacement.

vlowther 7y ago

well, good thing there is https://www.flatcar-linux.org/ https://www.flatcar-linux.org/

astrea 7y ago
> In fact, if CoreOS Container Linux disappeared tomorrow, it would have very little impact on the Flatcar Container Linux project. Well we will learn how true this is very shortly.
- blixtra 7y ago
  Chris from Kinvolk here. Our Flatcar builds are already completely independent of CoreOS builds. This is quite exciting for us as we can finally start updating the included software versions. We've been doing this a while for the edge channel (https://www.flatcar-linux.org/releases/ https://www.flatcar-linux.org/releases/) and have been waiting to do that with the other channels.
  - merb 7y ago
    it would be cool if https://github.com/coreos/container-linux-update-operator https://github.com/coreos/container-linux-update-operator would also be part of flatcar.

zymhan 7y ago

Fedora CoreOS seems like it has some pretty significant restrictions > It does not yet include native support for Azure, DigitalOcean, GCE, Vagrant, or the Container Linux community-supported platforms. > The rkt container runtime is not included. > Fedora CoreOS provides best-effort stability, and may occasionally include regressions or breaking changes for some use cases or workloads.

wmf 7y ago
This is the Red Hat "stay in business" business model, not the CoreOS "make it up in volume" business model.
- bdutta 7y ago
  Or IBM
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  How is breaking compat good for business?
newnewpdro 7y ago
>> The rkt container runtime is not included. rkt is dead
- c0restraint 7y ago
  It is? The GitHub project page does not indicate that: https://github.com/rkt/rkt/ https://github.com/rkt/rkt/
  - wmf 7y ago
    It's really dead. rkt never got much adoption and now Red Hat is promoting Podman instead.
    - stingraycharles 7y ago

ollien 7y ago

I mean this makes sense, right? Fedora Silverblue exists. Or are they totally separate products?

wwright 7y ago
Silverblue is an effort to bring this technology to the desktop AFAICT. Fedora Atomic Server uses some of the technology for server workloads, but maintains some traditional structure and architecture. CoreOS is intended to be a “new” architecture for servers if I am not mistaken. I may be :-)
- hosh 7y ago
  CoreOS was built using Gentoo / ChromeOS / Chromium OS family. There is a minimum set of services to run containers. Rootfs is read-only. Updates are done atomically by updating the standby rootfs, and the swapped at boot. There is no package manager. You bring everything else with images and containers. If tools are not found on the distro, you have to get them yourself by starting up an image that contains those tools. The build system that builds a new release is Gentoo. All the packages that are there gets updated, though the final release does not contain emerge or anything that actually can compile or build anything. After CoreOS got bought out by Redhat, they started porting over those ideas using the Fedora build system (so Redhat packages, yum, etc). I think the CoreOS Container OS will live on inside GCP as the customized container os as the default distro used on GKE (managed Kubernetes). Edit: I see someone mention FlatCar. Neat. I guess that is more of a successor project than the one used in GKE.
  - bogomipz 7y ago
    >"I think the CoreOS Container OS will live on inside GCP as the customized container os as the default distro used on GKE (managed Kubernetes)." I found this interesting. Does anyone have any insights how or why Google ended up choosing CoreoS for their GKE offering?
    - robszumski 7y ago

bovermyer 7y ago

What about RancherOS? Is that a viable replacement?

ShakataGaNai 7y ago
I'm surprised more people aren't mentioning RancherOS. It's a great "Docker Only" OS, like many of the other options mentioned. It doesn't have the market that CoreOS did, that's for sure, but still a great tool. It's tiny and being actively updated. Plus it's got good RPi support for all those serious Big Software Company deployments /s

fkistner 7y ago

Can someone recommend an immutable Linux distro, which offers auto-updates out-of-the-box and supports arm64 on RPi? Have been searching for something like this for a while for a personal project, but unfortunately neither Flatcar nor Fedora CoreOS seem to support arm64, RancherOS does not to seem to offer fully automatic updates.

choward 7y ago
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "immutable" but you might find NixOS (https://nixos.org/ https://nixos.org/) interesting. However, it might not be the best experience at the moment for the Raspberry Pi 4 (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/63720 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/63720).
infinisil 7y ago
As choward already mentioned, I think NixOS is a very good choice: aarch64 is decently well supported with a bunch of people running NixOS on their Raspbys, and cross compilation support is really good too if needed. See https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM/Raspberry_Pi https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM/Raspberry_Pi for more info, or hop into #nixos and/or #nixos-aarch64 on Freenode for help
Conan_Kudo 7y ago
The ARM version of Fedora CoreOS is just known as the Fedora IoT Edition: https://iot.fedoraproject.org/ https://iot.fedoraproject.org/ It's slimmer and more tuned for AArch64 and SBC type systems.

crad 7y ago

Yet another instance of RedHat buying something I used/liked and killing it off and offering a shitty alternative. And yet another reason I've tried to avoid giving RedHat money over the last 20+ years.

quasse 7y ago
I'm especially sad since I finished porting some of our Docker infrastructure to CoreOS today. I guess I missed the proverbial writing on the wall. Thank god Flatcar Linux looks to be a viable alternative and easy changeover.
- dharmab 7y ago
  How did you miss the announcement back in July? https://fedoramagazine.org/introducing-fedora-coreos/ https://fedoramagazine.org/introducing-fedora-coreos/
- pepemon 7y ago
  You have the stable release of Fedora CoreOS now.
pepemon 7y ago
What product have RH killed after acquisition?

qwerty456127 7y ago

Fedora CoreOS. Oh my. I din't even know Fedora Core is not the full name of the ordinary Fedora OS any more...

pepemon 7y ago
12 years have passed. Glad that you woke up.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  I still don't feel like Fedora CoreOS is a good name choice for a new OS distinct from what used to be named Fedora Core. Perhaps they could name it after another kind of hat or something.

rubyn00bie 7y ago

What did CoreOS offer that say ClearLinux, or good ol' Debian do not? It seems like the only difference is you've gottta `packagemanger_xyz install` a couple packages...?

forkexec 7y ago
There was no native userland. You picked an userland and it ran in a container along with /etc and other mounts. The idea being that the OS itself should be separate, developed as a whole and immutable like an appliance OS like FreeNAS, XenServer or VMware ESXi. For ops lifecycle supportability (installs, upgrades, downgrades, etc.), keeping the OS immutable has a lot of advantages in the "system entropy" department because users and admins can't corrupt the OS itself as easily, can replace it more easily and it's far easier for itself to run HIDS against. If it I were developing an immutable OS, there would be a hidden volume containing signed squashfs volumes and updates would be delta overlays that could be merged when the older base volume is no longer needed. Another interesting Linux distro that uses virtualization rather merely containers to isolate system components for security is Qubes OS. Really, I think any new Linux distros should: 1. be developed as an immutable whole 2. run most system and user-added services in containers 3. have package collections like nix or habitat that don't have dependency hells 4. make service and configuration management easy 5. not reinvent the wheel without specific goals and niche/s to occupy that are better than what came before 6. do damn good jobs of smoothing package rough edges, upstreaming patches and rapidly releasing security fixes (including ksplice/kpatch) 7. least surprise everywhere 8. think carefully about whether to go systemd or s6/runit/daemontools 9. manage logs better, preferably without local text files, streamed across a distributed system that scales like flume or kafka
dharmab 7y ago
My team at a Very Large Software Company runs CoreOS for two main reasons: 1. Reduced attack surface due to a very slim OS with no package manager. 2. CoreOS Ignition, a killer app OS provisioning/customization tool. No weird barely-documented kickstart scripts, and no long build and upload times for OS images. We can make changes/customizations to our OS and have them deployed in a cloud within literally minutes. We consider this a competitive advantage.

merb 7y ago

stuff that is happening with CoreOS is a complete NIH show. it's really akward what they are doing.