CoreOS Container Linux, the open-source operating system for deploying Linux container in large clusters, will be reaching end of life on May 26th, 2020, and will no longer be supported.

Based on Gentoo Linux, CoreOS Linux saw the light of day more than six years ago, on October 3rd, 2013. It was well received by the community for being a lightweight operating system designed for distributing payload applications inside software containers and it gained a lot of popularity in a short time span.

Three years later, in late 2016, CoreOS Linux changed its name to Container Linux by CoreOS or CoreOS Container Linux, in an attempt to distinguish the company’s name, CoreOS, from the container-focused Linux distribution, Container Linux, making things more clear to newcomers.

In January 2018, Red Hat announced that it will acquire Container Linux and said that it plans to merge the container-focused operating system with its in-house built Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host, a derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server providing a lightweight container OS, and later produce a brand new OS called Fedora CoreOS.

Now, Container Linux by CoreOS is reaching end of life, effective immediately on May 26th, 2020. After that date, it will no longer receive updates or security patches, and won’t be available to new subscribers on the AWS Marketplace. After September 1st, 2020, all published resources will be deleted as well or made read-only.

Container Linux alternatives

Sponsored by Red Hat, Fedora CoreOS is an official Fedora Edition and the official successor of Container Linux since Red Hat bought the company behind it. Fedora CoreOS combines technologies from Fedora Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host, and uses the same automatic update model of Container Linux.

However, Fedora CoreOS is currently missing some things, such as native support for Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine, and Vagrant cloud infrastructure providers, as well as the rkt container runtime.

Another alternative is Flatcar Container Linux, an immutable, self-updating and independently built GNU/Linux distribution for container workloads. It’s a drop-in replacement for Container Linux, so it is a safe bet for existing users who want to migrate.

Last updated 4 months ago