Google has announced that CoreOS, a specialized Linux distribution for computing at the scale of companies like Google and Facebook, is now officially available on its Compute Engine. This puts the Y Combinator alum right next to industry heavyweights like Debian, RedHat and Suse, which are among the default choices in Compute Engine’s control panel today. This is clearly a major win for the CoreOS team, which received funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia last year. The company argues that Google’s cloud service is “a perfect base” for CoreOS clusters.
CoreOS, a new lightweight Linux distribution customized for massive server deployments, has found a home on the Google Cloud Platform, giving organizations an easy way to test and use the software for their clusters and distributed computer programs. CoreOS will be offered in the Google cloud alongside other Linux distributions such as Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Suse. Two Rackspace engineers, Alex Polvi and Brandon Philips, along with Michael Marineau, developed CoreOS to better fit Linux into what they saw as an emerging use of the open-source operating system kernel, that of powering lots of cloud-based virtual servers. They forked Google’s Chrome OS, also Linux-based, to use as their starting point. Google has offered CoreOS as a preview since December, but on Thursday it went live as a full-fledged service offered on the Google Cloud Platform.