Silverblue is an effort to bring this technology to the desktop AFAICT. Fedora Atomic Server uses some of the technology for server workloads, but maintains some traditional structure and architecture.
CoreOS is intended to be a “new” architecture for servers if I am not mistaken. I may be :-)
CoreOS was built using Gentoo / ChromeOS / Chromium OS family. There is a minimum set of services to run containers. Rootfs is read-only. Updates are done atomically by updating the standby rootfs, and the swapped at boot.
There is no package manager. You bring everything else with images and containers. If tools are not found on the distro, you have to get them yourself by starting up an image that contains those tools.
The build system that builds a new release is Gentoo. All the packages that are there gets updated, though the final release does not contain emerge or anything that actually can compile or build anything.
After CoreOS got bought out by Redhat, they started porting over those ideas using the Fedora build system (so Redhat packages, yum, etc).
I think the CoreOS Container OS will live on inside GCP as the customized container os as the default distro used on GKE (managed Kubernetes).
Edit: I see someone mention FlatCar. Neat. I guess that is more of a successor project than the one used in GKE.
Historically CoreOS was the first OS you could easily PXE boot and have a working container host without performing installation. This was supported not as a secondary thought, but specifically designed to make scale out easier.
A lot of these concepts and benefits apply when you consider cloud images as opposed to PXE boot images. With CoreOS, there was little difference in configuration with these two patters, if the infrastructure had the same topology you could essentially use the same config (VM or Baremetal).
Google Ventures also invested money in CoreOS at one point.
Thanks for the insight. I was wondering what the two patterns are exactly that you referred to here:
>"With CoreOS, there was little difference in configuration with these two patters, if the infrastructure had the same topology you could essentially use the same config (VM or Baremetal)"
Also are re "cloud images" VMs then, similar to AMIs in AWS?
Sorry, I misspoke. I did not mean to imply that the Google containeros itself is a hard fork, but rather the ideas behind them lives on. I think those were based on ChromiumOS, but not CoreOS Container OS at least when I peeked into running GKE nodes.
As I mentioned in the edit, it looks like FlatCar is a true successor fork.
CoreOS is intended to be a “new” architecture for servers if I am not mistaken. I may be :-)