Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS

Red Hat today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc. for a purchase price of $250 million. By combining CoreOS’s container and orchestration offerings such as Rocket, Quay or Tectonic with Red Hat’s Kubernetes and container-based portfolio, including OpenShift, Red Hat aims to further accelerate adoption and development container technologies.

Alex Polvi, CEO, CoreOS comments on the acquisition: “Red Hat and CoreOS’s relationship began many years ago as open source collaborators developing some of the key innovations in containers and distributed systems, helping to make automated operations a reality. This announcement marks a new stage in our shared aim to make these important technologies ubiquitous in business and the world. Thank you to the CoreOS family, our customers, partners, and most of all, the free software community for supporting us in our mission to make the internet more secure through automated operations.”

It will be interesting to see what will happen with the Rocket (rkt) container runtime now that Red Hat is heavily invested in CRI-O. The same goes for the CoreOS Kubernetes distribution called Tectonic that could eventuelly be folded into Red Hat OpenShift.