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Today’s topics include Red Hat’s acquisition of CoreOS for $250 million; Cisco adding assurance capabilities to their Network Intuitive initiative; Google’s partnership with MobileIron on a platform for buying and distributing cloud services; and the Rook storage project that’s being launched by the Cloud Native Computing Platform.
Red Hat announced Jan. 30 that it is acquiring privately held container Linux and Kubernetes vendor CoreOS, in a deal valued at $250 million. CoreOS was founded in 2013 and had raised a total of $48 million in funding.
Both Red Hat and CoreOS are active contributors to the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration platform first created by Google, and Red Hat’s OpenShift platform and CoreOS’ Tectonic platform were in competition with each other. CoreOS also has its own Linux distribution that was originally known as CoreOS Linux and was rebranded as Container Linux in December 2016.
Red Hat now sees CoreOS’ products as being complementary with its own, stating “CoreOS can further extend Red Hat’s leadership and influence in the Kubernetes upstream community and also bring new enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift around automated operations and management.”
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced Jan. 29 their new project Rook, which is a container storage effort that works with the Kubernetes orchestration platform. The Rook project is an open-source orchestrator for distributed storage systems running in cloud-native environments.
Bassam Tabbara, CEO of startup Upbound and creator of Rook, said, “Flocker, CSI and other plug-in approaches focus on the consumption side of storage. Rook focuses on the provider side of storage; it runs the actual storage cluster as a cloud-native application integrated into Kubernetes.”
Kubernetes can make use of many different types of storage back ends.
At the Cisco Live show in Barcelona, Spain, Jan. 30, Cisco Systems officials announced that they have added assurance capabilities to their Network Intuitive initiative as part of the second wave of their intent-based networking push.
Last year, Cisco unveiled the first two of three parts of the strategy—translation and activation— with technologies that capture the intent of network administrators and translate that intent into policies, and then configure the systems and orchestrate the policies in line with the intent.
The new software adds the third phase, assurance, which takes information from across the data center, verifies that the intent of the network administrator is being followed and makes recommendations when a problem is found.
Google’s Orbitera e-commerce unit has teamed up with MobileIron to give enterprises that deploy numerous cloud applications a more secure way to find, buy, distribute and manage those services from multiple vendors. The service combines Orbitera’s commerce platform with MobileIron’s cloud security and mobile app distribution capabilities so enterprises can use the platform to securely buy distribute mobile apps across the organization.
For resellers, OEMs and software vendors, the platform offers a marketplace for procuring and delivering mobile applications and services to customers across multiple operating systems and devices.
Orbitera and MobileIron are also working on enabling several capabilities on the platform, including customized bundling and a consolidated billing feature.