Last year, after coreOS joined Redhat, Fedora CoreOS announced its first preview release and now it has been released for general use.
After getting acquired by Redhat, CoreOS Container Linux and Fedora Atomic Host fused to release a new Fedora edition, dubbed the Fedora CoreOS, borrowing technology from the both.
So now Fedora CoreOS possesses the provisioning tools, automatic update model, and philosophy of CoreOS Container Linux and the packaging technology, OCI support, and SELinux security of Atomic Host.
Integrated features in the current Fedora CoreOS
- Automatic update by downloading new OS releases, install and reboot using a two-pronged approach to avoid existing machine break
- It is built from Fedora 31, featuring Linux 5.4, systemd 243, and Ignition 2.1
- OCI and Docker Container support via Podman 1.7 and Moby 18.09
Deployment Platform
Fedora CoreOS can be deployed on a variety of platforms such as:
- Bare metal hardware
- OpenStack and VMware
- Cloud images for public clouds like Alibaba, AWS, Azure, and GCP
- Live run from RAM via ISO and PXE (netboot) images
Is Fedora CoreOS stable?
As per the official blog, Fedora CoreOS does not give guaranteed stability, which is challenging to achieve along with the incremental and evolving development required by Fedora CoreOS.
However, Fedora CoreOS is still under active development. The CoreOS team promises to provide tools and work over the time to manage the impact of any regressions or breaking changes from automatic updates.
Future of CoreOS Container Linux and Fedora Atomic Host
CoreOS Container Linux will be maintained for a few more months, as mentioned in the latest blog by Fedora CoreOS team, whose end-of-life date will be announced later this month.
Fedora Atomic Host has already reached end-of-life, and the users are highly recommended to migrate to Fedora CoreOS as soon as possible.
Upcoming Enhancements
Fedora CoreOS also serves as the upstream to Red Hat CoreOS. It aims to provide the best container host to run containerized workloads securely and at scale.
Here are some highlighted upcoming improvements:
- Addition of the next release stream for extended testing of forthcoming Fedora releases
- Support for new cloud and virtualization platforms, and processor architectures other than x86_64
- Closer integration with Kubernetes distributions
- Additional documentation
If you want to try out the CoreOS, you can download OS images or cloud image IDs from here.
To keep yourself notified with all Linux and open-source releases and updates, keep following Fossbytes.
