Red Hat acquired CoreOS in January 2018, including Tectonic, CoreOS’ enterprise Kubernetes solution.

Red Hat has an existing container platform, OpenShift, which it says offers chief information officers a powerful, open standards-based solution to fuel digital transformation efforts, helping enterprises more quickly adopt emerging technologies without sacrificing investing applications or IT investments.

However, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is known for its stability and long-term support, while Tectonic offers a way to manage large Kubernetes footprints through automated over-the-air updates. This means systems administrators can roll out upgrades to entire Tectonic clusters and underlying Container Linux hosts via automated processes.

The first is a new variant of RHEL, named Red Hat CoreOS, which “will bring the consistency of RHEL with the consumption of over-the-air updates from the kernel to Kubernetes”, said Paul Cormier, executive vice-president and president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat.

Secondly, Red Hat will integrate CoreOS capabilities with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. The addition of the CoreOS automation technologies will advance Red Hat’s existing offerings and make hybrid cloud environments a strong choice for deploying modern and traditional applications, said Ashesh Badani vice-president and general manager, OpenShift.

These enhancements will help drive automation at each layer of the cloud-native stack and come with the backing of Red Hat’s commitment to enterprise-grade stability and support. Practically speaking, this means Kubernetes deployments can be managed at scale easier, with the bulk of rote maintenance tasks performed automatically. In turn, this lessens the need for administrator action and cluster oversight.

Red Hat says it will extend the automation to its independent software vendor ecosystem, enabling easy delivery and maintenance of applications and services on top of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. 

Red Hat also said no customer will be left behind, and all Tectonic customers will become OpenShift customers.

The next edition of Red Hat OpenShift will be released in July.

“Previously, enterprises had to choose between public cloud lock-in for ease-of-use or managing the complexity of a hybrid IT environment to retain full control over workloads and data. Now, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform will be positioned to settle this argument, delivering automation across the entire container stack, from the underlying operating system to the application services, to make hybrid IT easier to consume while retaining enhanced security, driving a new model for how enterprises perceive the open hybrid cloud,” Badanivice said.

The writer is attending Red Hat Summit 2018 in San Francisco as a guest of the company