Flatcar Container Linux Hitches onto the CNCF
The cloud native computing stack has finally gotten its own dedicated operating system.
Built on containers, Flatcar Container Linux, a derivative of the CoreOS distribution, has been accepted as an incubation project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
CoreOS was acquired in 2018 by Red Hat, which itself was acquired a year later by IBM. Kinvolk, a Berlin-based cloud native technology company now owned by Microsoft, originally forked Flatcar from CoreOS Container Linux.
A Container-Centric OS
Unlike traditional Linux distributions, Flatcar is container-centric, which makes it a suitable candidate for a cloud native stack. It includes only those packages needed to run containers and is updated with new, validated container images.
It also follows the best practices for running operations in a cloud computing environment: Each instance is built on a cryptographically secure read-only file system, making it a declaratively-defined immutable system. Configuration is described in a YAML file, which defines how the software is deployed.
An update server, which is part of the project, that provides a set of fleet-wide policy controls and graphical overview of all the machines on a system running Flatcar.
“A secure community-owned cloud native operating system was one of the missing layers of the CNCF technology stack,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF, in a statement. “As validated by a thorough due diligence process, Flatcar has more than proven itself in this role.”
Flatcar also has close ties to Kubernetes, the most widely-used cloud native container orchestration tool, by way of close integration of the Cluster API.
Stackit uses the OS to run its managed Kubernetes service, as does Wipro for its managed PostgreSQL service.
Flatcar Roadmap
Another user of Flatcar is Adobe.
“Adobe leverages Flatcar as the host operating system for self-managed Kubernetes deployments across our multicloud environment, including Microsoft Azure,” said Joseph Sandoval, Adobe principal product manager and an end-user advisory board member at CNCF, in a statement. “We have proven it out at very large scale, and been really impressed both with how Flatcar simplifies our operations and how the project has matured and evolved to stay at the forefront of Linux OS development with capabilities such as Cluster API and system extensions.”
As of press time, the project has collected nearly 1,000 GitHub stars, and 643 contributors across 429 issues.
By joining CNCF, Flatcar will get assistance in governance, marketing support, and community outreach, as well build an alliance with other CNCF-incubating technologies, such as Backstage, Chaos Mesh, the Container Network Interface (CNI), gRPC, Knative, KubeEdge, Kubeflow, OpenTelemetry and others.
Going forward, the Flatcar project plans address a wider variety of use cases by expanding the Cluster API to enable independent updates of control plane and operating system. More work will also be done to strengthen security, through support of secure boot, disk encryption, and integrity measurement architecture (IMA), according to the CNCF.
