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Three days ago, Fedora announced the first preview release of the open-source project Fedora CoreOS as a secure and reliable host for computer clusters. It is specifically designed for running containerized workloads with automatic updates to the latest OS improvements, bug fixes, and security updates. It is secure, minimal, monolithic and is optimized for working with Kubernetes.

The main goal of Fedora CoreOS is to be a reliable container host to run containerized workloads securely and at scale. It integrates Ignition from Container Linux technology and rpm-ostree and SELinux hardening from Project Atomic Host.

Fedora CoreOS is expected to be a successor to Container Linux eventually. The Container Linux project will continue to be supported throughout 2019, leaving users with ample time to migrate and provide feedback. Fedora has also assured Container Linux users that continued support will be provided to them without any disruption. Fedora CoreOS will also become the successor to Fedora Atomic Host. The current plan is for Fedora Atomic Host to have at least a 29 version and 6 months of lifecycle.

Fedora CoreOS will support AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, GCP, OpenStack, Packet, QEMU, VirtualBox, VMware, and bare-metal system platforms. The initial release of Fedora CoreOS will only run on bare metal, Quick Emulator (QEMU), VMware, and AWS on the 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set (x86_64) only. It supports provisioning via Ignition spec 3.0.0 and the Fedora CoreOS Config Transpiler, and will provide automatic updates with Zincati and rpm-ostree, and will run containers with Podman and Moby.

Benjamin Gilbert from Red Hat, who is the primary sponsor for FedoraOS wrote a mail archive announcing the preview. Per Gilbert, in the coming months, more platforms will be added to Fedora CoreOS and new functionalities will be explored. He has also notified users that the Fedora CoreOS preview should not be used for production workloads, as it may change before the stable release.

Since Fedora CoreOS is freely available, it will embrace a variety of containerized use cases while Red Hat CoreOS will continue to provide a focused immutable host for OpenShift. It will be released and life-cycled at the same time as the platform.

Users are happy with the first preview of Fedora CoreOS.

Another milestone in container optimized immutable infrastructure. @fedora @coreos is now available as a preview! https://t.co/ykqoYleFL2 — Michael Mattsson (@datamattsson) July 18, 2019

A user on Reddit comments, “Wow looks awesome”.

For details on how to create Ignition configs, head over to the Fedora Project docs.

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