CoreOS is hosting its user conference in San Francisco today. Unsurprisingly, the company had a few announcements to make at the event. Most of these centered around its Tectonic platform for managing Kubernetes-based container infrastructures.
For the most part, these updates are pretty straightforward. Tectonic now uses the latest version of Kubernetes, for example (1.6.4), which the company argues means that it is currently the only enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform to run the latest version of upstream Kubernetes. This latest version mostly includes bug fixes, though, and isn’t exactly a major release.
What’s more important, though, is that developers can now easily provision etcd — CoreOS’ popular key-value data store — with the help of the new etcd Operator. This means developers who want to use etcd can now use the Operator to automatically scale etcd as necessary and the service will handle failures gracefully and update itself as necessary.
As CoreOS founder and CEO Alex Polvi told me, the company’s main focus right now is on bringing on more enterprise customers. He argues that as enterprises look to containers for developing their applications (or bringing existing applications into the cloud), they don’t want to lock themselves into a vendor like Amazon, Microsoft or Google. “Cloud computing is moving to Amazon — actually — it’s not even moving, it’s already there,” he told me. “But when you are a year into it, your bill is through the roof and you are using all of their APIs and you are completely locked in. We intend to end that cycle.”
As Kubernetes becomes the container orchestration platform of choice for many companies, CoreOS wants to help them use it on all of the major cloud platforms (or on premise) while preventing this kind of lock-in by supporting all the major platforms.
Polvi also noted that the company only really started selling directly into the enterprise in the last quarter of 2016. The company now has its processes in place and Polvi argues that as Kubernetes is taking off, so is CoreOS’ sales pipeline.