Welcome to eighth week of 52 Technologies in 2016 blog series. This week we will learn about CoreOS, an Open source Linux distribution built to run and manage highly scalable and fault tolerant systems. It is designed to docker and rocket containers. When I started learning about CoreOS, I was overwhelmed by its complexity and different components that you have to know and interact with like etcd, systemd, fleet, Flannel. I am not an Ops guy so CoreOS documentation and many tutorials that I found on the web didn’t clicked with me. The goal of this tutorial is to help application developers understand why they should care about CoreOS and show them how to work with CoreOS cluster running on top of Amazon EC2.
What is CoreOS?
According to CoreOS website, CoreOS is a Linux for Massive Server Deployments. This means it is not a general purpose Linux distro that you can use as your development workspace instead, you will use it to run and your applications at scale.
Built on Chrome OS, CoreOS is a lean and mean operating system that runs minimal Linux. When you limit your OS to the bare minimal i.e. just openssl, ssh, linux kernel, gcc then you need a mechanism to run package and run applications that you want to use. CoreOS does not even has a package manager like yum or Apt. CoreOS is very different from other Linux distributions as it is centered around containers. Linux Containers is an operating-system-level virtualization environment for running multiple isolated Linux systems (containers) on a single Linux control host. CoreOS uses containers to run and manage applications services. You package application along with its dependencies within a container that can be run on a single or multiple CoreOS machines. CoreOS supports both Docker and Rocket containers.
Docker is the poster child of containers. In November 2013, I first learnt and wrote about Docker. Docker is a set of toolset geared around containers. Docker clicked with everyone and overnight became the tool that everyone wanted to learn and introduce in their organization. One reason Docker became popular very quickly is its approachability to an average developer. To use Docker, you don’t have to know Linux internals and work with complicated tools.
CoreOS developers claim that it is 40% more efficient in RAM usage than an average linux installation.
Read the full blog at https://github.com/shekhargulati/52-technologies-in-2016/blob/master/08-coreos/README.md
Shekhar Gulati 