BERLIN--At the CoreOS Fest event here, CoreOS is announcing a new $28 million round funding, bringing total funding to date to $48 million. In addition to the new funding, CoreOS is unveiling multiple new efforts, including a new version of its etcd distributed key store, BitTorrent-based container image pulls with QuayCTL and JWTproxy technology as a new way to authenticate microservices.

CoreOS also is announcing a new collaborative effort with Project Calico to integrate CoreOS' flannel networking technology.

In addition to the CoreOS efforts, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is using the CoreOS Fest event as the location to announce its latest project inclusion with Prometheus. CoreOS is a leading contributor to Prometheus, which is an open-source monitoring project.

In an exclusive video interview with eWEEK, Brandon Philips, co-founder and CTO of CoreOS, discusses all the CoreOS Fest news and why it will help push the container market forward.

"We continue to grow the business quite nicely," Philips said about the new funding round, which received investment from GV (formerly Google Ventures), Accel, Fuel Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Y Combinator Continuity Fund. "This whole industry that is emerging around containers continues to grow, so we have new customers that we have to continue to support and new projects that we need to invest in."

On the container networking front, Philips said that the CoreOS-led open-source flannel project's connectivity layer is being brought together with Project Calico's policy layer to provide a more robust system for users running Kubernetes. CoreOS is also adding BitTorrent support to its Quay container image repository with a project called QuayCTL, enabling users to more easily download large images.

Additionally, CoreOS is announcing a preview of its etcd v3 distributed key store, which can now scale up to 5,000 nodes. The etcd v3 technology is set to be included as part of the open-source Kubernetes 1.3 release that is scheduled to debut in June.

"The Kubernetes 1.3 release is coming up, and there a lot of bits of technology that we have been contributing to that project over time," Philips said.

Kubernetes was the first project to officially become part of the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). At CoreOS Fest, the Prometheus project officially became part of CNCF as well.

Philips explained that Prometheus has two pieces, in that it can do the actual collection of metrics about container environments and it's also a time-series database that holds onto the metrics collected from a cluster.

"So you can say, 'Generate me a trend graph for memory usage across these hosts,'" Philips said.

Watch the full video interview with Brandon Philips below:

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.