CoreOS Shores Up Container Management

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At the CoreOS Fest conference today, CoreOS solidified support for the App Container spec (appc) for building and defining container applications, while also announcing that it is extending the functionality of the Quay container registry for private cloud deployments.

Vendors that have joined a new governing body for appc include Google, VMware, Red Hat and Apcera. Launched last year, the App Container spec addresses container security, portability and modularity. The rkt project, a container runtime developed by CoreOS as an alternative to Docker, is the first implementation of appc.

At the conference, Google specifically announced appc support in the Kubernetes project by making rkt available as a configurable container runtime for Kubernetes clusters. Apcera, meanwhile, launched Kurma, an implementation of appc within an execution environment for running applications in containers.

At the same time, CoreOS announced that the Quay container registry now sports appc along with an updated user interface and build system and a new caching layer, image tagging history and security capabilities.

Kelsey Hightower, product manager and chief advocate, CoreOS, says Quay supports both rkt and Docker images, which CoreOS is betting will both be used within enterprise IT environments. Interest in private cloud implementations of Quay is rising, says Hightower, because IT organizations want to make sure that intellectual property doesn’t wind up accidentally being downloaded via a public container registry. At the same time, Hightower says there will be other times when IT organizations will want to take advantage of a public container registry such as Quay running on the CoreOS Tectonic distribution of Linux hosted in a public cloud.

Obviously, most of the action surrounding containers these days is occurring in the cloud. But it’s only a matter of time before containers increasingly move inside the firewall. As that process occurs, IT operations teams will find themselves being asked to deploy all kinds of new operations software to support containers running on physical and virtual servers inside and out of any number of cloud computing environments.