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Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS

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Re: Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS

#91

Post by pm90 »

samstave wrote: post #72
pm90 wrote: post #46

Red Hat acquired Ansible, now CoreOS. They seem to be really gunning for the DevOps marketplace.

yep, I would suspect that too many at-scale ops are using either ubuntu/amazon/centos etc are eating at their market share capabilities... buying up these cements them in the devops toolbox a lot longer. Super smart. However, I would love to see how they have evolved their openstack offering and their integration with intel's secure compute since the last time I worked on that project... I havent really looked - but…

> is there any at all risk from a security standpoint where redhat owns the tooling for many devops customers?

They open source a lot of their tools, so I don't really think there's any lock-in (I assume that is what you meant by "insecurity" in them owning the tools, and not traditional computer security)

Re: Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS

#93

Post by greglindahl »

chrissnell wrote: post #88
zapita wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt CoreOS has any meaningful revenue (my guess is they are between $5M and $10M of recurring annual revenue). I also doubt they have a single customer that isn't either A. already a Red Hat customer, or B. too small to be interesting to them. For $250M Red Hat bought outstanding technology, a strong R&D team with community street cred, and upstream influence in Kubernetes. They know how to monetize these things.…

As someone who used CoreOS in a commercial setting, I think you are spot on. We wanted to pay them but we were never big enough to afford their commercial offerings. They wanted a lot of cash for their subscriptions and I think most would-be customers were looking for something less expensive--basically open source with support. Redhat offers an existing and proven enterprise customer base that will cut the big check…

So are you predicting a CentOS/Red Hat split for existing CoreOS users, or do you think existing customers will migrate to something different?

Re: Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS

#94

Post by pjmlp »

gigatexal wrote: post #39

And they say there's no money in open source... ;-) Anyone want to wager that MS buys Canonical?

There is money where one can make a business selling support contracts, training or consulting to companies.

Or bundle hardware with source code for the software side.

Now for open source desktop software targeted at regular consumers, that is a total different story.

Re: Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS

#95

Post by zapita »

greglindahl wrote: post #93
chrissnell wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who used CoreOS in a commercial setting, I think you are spot on. We wanted to pay them but we were never big enough to afford their commercial offerings. They wanted a lot of cash for their subscriptions and I think most would-be customers were looking for something less expensive--basically open source with support. Redhat offers an existing and proven enterprise customer base that will cut the big check…

So are you predicting a CentOS/Red Hat split for existing CoreOS users, or do you think existing customers will migrate to something different?

Probably a mix. A lot of it depends on how they handle the sunsetting and migration.

Assuming the industry norm, which is a botched sunsetting and incomplete migration, the majority of free CoreOS users would go looking elsewhere. And they would probably scatter to the wind rather than flock to a single winner, since the OS space is quite crowded and fragmented.

Re: Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS

#96

Post by zapita »

politician wrote: post #81
jacques_chester wrote: post #59

This is a good move for CoreOS and Red Hat, I think. I've thought for a while that the platform market would shake out and be left with one and at most two winners. Previously we saw Deis fold into Microsoft and now CoreOS into Red Hat. I expect that Docker will run independently for another few years before their investors realise it's time to push for an acquisition exit, but it's unclear by whom. I figure Heptio w…

I agree that this is a good move by Red Hat to position themselves with rkt and Quay ahead of Docker going to Microsoft (who will pay a premium to try to put this genie back into the bottle) Given their self-inflicted XHR debacle that dethroned Office, I just don't see Microsoft passing up this opportunity. Google, on the other hand, doesn't need Docker to plug any holes in their go to market unless it's a blocking p…

> this is a good move by Red Hat to position themselves with rkt

Red Hat does not give a damn about rkt. They care about Kubernetes, specifically establishing and consolidating a dominant position in upstream kubernetes development. CoreOS helps them do that.

rkt on the other hand is a dead project and completely useless to Red Hat.

> Google, on the other hand, doesn't need Docker to plug any holes in their go to market unless it's a blocking play.

Google has a massive hole in their go to market. They have no clue how to sell to enterprises, and because of that they are falling behind AWS and Microsoft in the cloud market. However you're right that it would take much more than a Docker to plug that hole.

Honestly if I were Google I would try to buy Red Hat, or an even larger enterprise vendor like SAP or Oracle. Not only would they be buying the enterprise distribution they lack, but they would also secure a major customer for their own infrastructure and keep up with the economies of scale AMZN and MSFT are building up. But I don't know that they will develop the humility to admit that they need that - and even if they do there's no guarantee that the integration would work... Culturally they are worlds apart.

EDIT: another interesting acquisition target for Google Cloud would be Vmware. Diane Greene founded it, then got fired by EMC post-acquisition, something I am betting she still holds a grudge over. Now she runs Google Cloud. If I'm her, I like the idea of buying the place and savoring a triumphal Steve Jobs takeover moment. I don't know to what extent this is complicated by this week's announcement of a Vmware/Dell reverse merger. Maybe they buy the whole thing? But then would Michael Dell want to run this new mega-Cloud group? And how does that play with Diane's ambitions? This might bool down to whether Diane likes the idea of working for Michael Dell. He has vastly more go-to-market experience which is what matters most in their position.

I really think there should be an HBO Silicon Valley - Enterprise spinoff :-)

Re: Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS

#97

Post by vidarh »

merb wrote: post #47
rzzzt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atomic uses rpm-ostree, which looks similar to Omaha from a client perspective (update, roll back to previous version): http://www.projectatomic.io/docs/os-updates/

is there an alternative to locksmith? the "automatic" update ( https://coreos.com/os/docs/latest/update-strategies.html ) and/or https://github.com/coreos/container-linux-update-operator ? basically on coreos I don't need to run "rpm-ostree" to have an updated system. it is actually updated automatically.

And importantly, you can control updates across a whole cluster by limiting how many machines are allowed to update simultaneously.

Re: Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS

#98

Post by r0fls »

zapita wrote: post #96
politician wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this is a good move by Red Hat to position themselves with rkt and Quay ahead of Docker going to Microsoft (who will pay a premium to try to put this genie back into the bottle) Given their self-inflicted XHR debacle that dethroned Office, I just don't see Microsoft passing up this opportunity. Google, on the other hand, doesn't need Docker to plug any holes in their go to market unless it's a blocking p…

> this is a good move by Red Hat to position themselves with rkt Red Hat does not give a damn about rkt. They care about Kubernetes, specifically establishing and consolidating a dominant position in upstream kubernetes development. CoreOS helps them do that. rkt on the other hand is a dead project and completely useless to Red Hat. > Google, on the other hand, doesn't need Docker to plug any holes in their go to mar…

I think Google being able to buy Oracle is a bit of a stretch at this point. Oracle is 1/4 the market cap of Google. So, it seems unlikely they would have the capital available.

Re: Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS

#100

Post by zapita »

r0fls wrote: post #98
zapita wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is a good move by Red Hat to position themselves with rkt Red Hat does not give a damn about rkt. They care about Kubernetes, specifically establishing and consolidating a dominant position in upstream kubernetes development. CoreOS helps them do that. rkt on the other hand is a dead project and completely useless to Red Hat. > Google, on the other hand, doesn't need Docker to plug any holes in their go to mar…

I think Google being able to buy Oracle is a bit of a stretch at this point. Oracle is 1/4 the market cap of Google. So, it seems unlikely they would have the capital available.

You are right. I was extrapolating future scenarios where Oracle or SAP trip up in their race to the Cloud, causing a major drop in their stock. Honestly it's a pretty realistic scenario, it's not a secret that the Dell, HPE, SAP and Oracles of the world have serious challenges ahead of them. One of them is bound to hit an attractive price, and for a bold and deep-pocketed suitor to act on it. The question is when?
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