CoreOS on Oct. 17 announced the acquisition of privately held container management vendor Redspread. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed.
Redspread got its start in the Y Combinator cyber accelerator for technology startups and was officially launched in March. Coincidentally, CoreOS was also originally part of Y Combinator, graduating in 2013. To date, CoreOS has raised $48 million in funding to help fuel its container efforts. The acquisition of Redspread is the second acquisition by CoreOS and comes more than two years after CoreOS’ acquisition of quay.io in 2014.
“Redspread is really focused on the end user and helping business to adopt Kubernetes,” Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, told eWEEK. “That’s very much aligned with what we’re doing in Tectonic, which is CoreOS’ Kubernetes product.”
CoreOS first launched Tectonic in April 2015 as a commercially supported distribution of the Kubernetes open-source container orchestration project. Kubernetes, which was originally started by Google, recently unveiled its 1.4 release with added security features. By having the Redspread team join CoreOS, the goal is to accelerate development on Tectonic, Polvi said.
The core of Redspread’s technology is the company’s open-source Spread project. Spread provides capabilities around version control for Kubernetes that will be very useful to Tectonic users, according to Polvi.
“Spread is like Git for Kubernetes,” he said.
Git is the popular open-source version control system originally developed by Linux creator Linus Torvalds and now is at the center of GitHub and thousands of open-source projects. Polvi noted that production operators need the ability to use a version control system that provides logging and the ability to revert to a prior version.
While Spread will find its way into Tectonic, it could also one day become part of a larger open-source effort such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). CoreOS is one of the founding members of the CNCF, which got started in July 2015 and now hosts three projects: Kubernetes, Prometheus and OpenTracing. Polvi said CoreOS is considering which of its open-source projects, including Spread, might benefit from CNCF involvement.
“We’re big supporters of the CNCF, and we’ll do our part to help make that foundation successful,” he said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
