CoreOS Announces Free Availability Of Its Docker-Focused Linux Distribution

 Saturday, September 06, 2014:  Last year Docker emerged as one of the most discussed virtualisation technologies. But running Docker requires much effort. CoreOS has announced that its Docker-focused Linux distribution is now available for free as an image which can be deployed on the popular DigitalOcean cloud service. It also lowers the barrier to entry and the cost for getting up the Docker and running it.


DigitalOcean is one of the fastest growing cloud vendors which offers services for just $5 a month. It runs on fast solid-state drives (SSDs). In March DigitalOcean announced Series A round of funding which brought in $37.5 million from investors. Droplets are deployed by users as virtual instances of operating systems. Now the new partnership brings the CoreOS as an image which DigitalOcean customers can easily deploy as a Droplet.

Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, said, "Similar to DigitalOcean’s other OS offerings, users simply choose the CoreOS image on the Droplet creation page and can spin up a CoreOS server instantly.” It's a purpose-built OS for deploying Docker container virtualisation technology which started last August. In June, Series A funding was announced by CoreOS and in July CoreOS delivered its first stable release, which was built on the project's existing alpha and beta release development efforts.

The new partnership between CoreOS and DigitalOcean is not aimed at creating any specific amount of revenue. Polvi said, "By adding support of CoreOS, DigitalOcean is opening the doors for developers to start exploring all the benefits of CoreOS.” CoreOS isn't just a freely available Linux OS, a commercial offering is there also. The Managed Linux Service was launched in June and it provides customers with a managed OS as a service technology. CoreOS has clustered server capabilities too with a technology called “etcd”. With this deployment multiple servers are connected together for higher availability, backup and failover capabilities.

Polvi said, "You can use CoreOS just fine on one machine, but a cluster is going to be multiple Droplets because a cluster is innately multi-server. As of right now, we primarily give you high availability in each region, yet a lot of people have had success with multiple CoreOS clusters in different regions. This is technically possible."