Now available: The user preview release of Fedora CoreOS

Red Hat, along with the Fedora Community, are excited to announce that the first user preview release of Fedora CoreOS is now available! First announced at Red Hat Summit 2018, Fedora CoreOS is an operating system aimed at providing a fully automated experience for cloud-native and container workloads. It brings together the latest Linux innovations from the Fedora community and key CoreOS components like Ignition, with the latest Open Container Initiative (OCI) technology for running containers.

Much like its predecessor, Container Linux, Fedora CoreOS shares many of the same design goals around automatic and transactional updates, multiple release streams for canary nodes and a declarative provisioning configuration that is platform agnostic. The Fedora CoreOS team also intends to expand its functionality to support for OKD, full SELinux support and other innovations.

In early 2018, Red Hat made a huge investment in CoreOS, Inc., and doubled down on its container strategy. CoreOS was well-known for its Container Linux and Tectonic products, along with a plethora of open source projects, many of which have reached mainstream adoption. Since the inception of Container Linux, the container ecosystem has evolved and matured in a number of ways. The most significant of these is that today the ecosystem centers around Kubernetes rather than the container engine.

The gravitational pull we see around Kubernetes helps to unify numerous Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects and also helps promote an operational focus aimed at distributed systems. This, in turn, makes us think differently about updates, lifecycle and the boundaries of immutability as it relates to the operating system. With Fedora CoreOS, we’re able to preserve a significant amount of the user experience from Container Linux, while also working to refocus some of the technology to better adapt to the demands of Kubernetes.

Over time, we intend for Fedora CoreOS to meet nearly all of the same use cases as Container Linux plus include support for OKD, the upstream project for Red Hat OpenShift. Fedora CoreOS also serves as an upstream integration point for many projects shared by Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS, including Ignition, rpm-ostree and Afterburn. The project will also serve as the full replacement for Fedora Atomic Host.

We encourage everyone to take a look at the preview, get involved, and help shape the future of Fedora CoreOS.

Ben Breard is principal product manager, Containers and CoreOS, at Red Hat.