While I never used CoreOS, the team certainly played a big part in the new wave of devops. The team also brought us etcd and a lot of the niceties of the devX in kubernetes et al these days. The article doesn't mention him, but shoutout to Brandon Phillips (technical lead) and his team for so much innovation in the space!
> Red Hat, which purchased the company behind CoreOS in 2018, will, as of Sept.1, 2020, delete all CoreOS images. That means even if you wanted to download CoreOS (without supported updates), you won’t be able to.<p>> Although Fedora CoreOS is the official replacement for CoreOS, there are a few use cases it cannot replace, such as:<p>> No native support for Azure, Digital Ocean, GCE, Vagrant, or Container Linux community-supported platforms.
The rkt container runtime, originally developed by CoreOS, is missing.<p>Have these images of CoreOS (that RedHat will delete) not been added to the Wayback Machine yet? Or not backed up anywhere else?<p>> For those looking for a non-Red Hat alternative should check out the Flatcar Linux project, [1] a fork of CoreOS Container Linux.<p>So there is an (almost) equivalent alternative for those who use the images that are going to be deleted (and one that doesn't have the limitations of Fedora CoreOS)?<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.flatcar-linux.org/releases/" rel="nofollow">https://www.flatcar-linux.org/releases/</a>
Too soon, I know, but can we soon start talking about abandoning all corporate-managed open source projects?<p>I wouldn't be surprised at this move if I were a CoreOS user, but I would be pretty pissed off that the next 6 months of my work would be migrating to a new platform for production work, all because the Linux distro I used got bought for its IP and customer list.<p>Or, say when HashiCorp is eventually bought, and suddenly its parent company decides, no more free tools for you, kids! Buy our other, more crappy products instead, but here's some free samples you can use at small scale. Also you need to rewrite all your code.<p>This extends to virtually every important project in the cloud computing ecosystem. They're all just run by companies, not a distributed decentralized community of users and developers (cat-herded by a BDFL) like every successful multi-generational open source project. There's also only one widely-supported Linux distribution in the world which isn't run by a corporation, meaning if that distribution ever goes down, everyone who uses Linux for more than its kernel is at the mercy of that given corporation, and we'll probably see massive fragmentation.<p>Open Source and GNU basically got its start to prevent corporations from preventing you from doing what you wanted with software, but it had a nasty side-effect: they can now make whatever you do with it obsolete and unsupportable. A bit like a car manufacturer no longer shipping replacement parts, forcing you to find some machinists to support an aging fleet of obsolete vehicles. And sure, if the impact is <i>only</i> to corporate engineers, who cares, but as one of those engineers, it is very annoying that we literally are letting them do this to us.
I think the idea behind it was definitely sound and pretty cool. I used CoreOS a couple of times for internal projects, using Docker (not rkt) but I think as Kubernetes became ubiquitously available on managed services, the need for me to attempt to build my own docker infrastructure started to wane.<p>Goodbye CoreOS.
I really enjoyed managing a CoreOS cluster in the past. It was one of those project where every product developed was great, like etcd, Ignition, CoreDNS and even Fleet, at the time.<p>I wonder how far they'd have gotten if they'd refused to sell.
> will, as of Sept.1, 2020, delete all CoreOS images<p>I get moving on / cutting product lines but I don’t see the need to delete all the images.
CoreOS, docker, and mesos was an alternative to kubernetes. I'd say while using flatcar is viable, it looks like kubernetes is what the people have chosen.