Red Hat to acquire CoreOS, expanding its Kubernetes operations

Red Hat announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, an innovator in Kubernetes and container-native solutions, for a purchase price of $250 million, subject to certain adjustments at closing that are not expected to be material.

Red Hat's acquisition of CoreOS will further its vision of enabling customers to build any application and deploy them in any environment with the flexibility afforded by open source.

By combining CoreOS's capabilities with Red Hat's Kubernetes and container-based portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat aims to further accelerate adoption and development of the industry's leading hybrid cloud platform for modern application workloads.

As applications move to hybrid and multicloud environments, a growing number of organisations are using containers to more easily build, deploy and move applications to, from, and across clouds.

Founded in 2013, CoreOS was created with a goal of building and delivering infrastructure for organisations of all sizes that mirrored that of large-scale software companies, automatically updating and patching servers and helping to solve pain points like downtime, security and resilience.

Since its early work to popularise lightweight Linux operating systems optimised for containers, CoreOS has become well-regarded as a leader in technologies that are enabling the broad adoption of scalable and resilient containerised applications.

CoreOS is the creator of CoreOS Tectonic, an enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform that provides automated operations, enables portability across private and public cloud providers, and is based on open source software.

It also offers CoreOS Quay, an enterprise-ready container registry.

Red Hat was early to embrace containers and container orchestration and has contributed to related open source communities, including Kubernetes, where it is the second-leading contributor behind only Google.

Red Hat is also a leader in enabling organisations around the world to embrace container-based applications, including its work on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry's most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform.

With the combination of Red Hat and CoreOS, Red Hat amplifies its presence in both upstream community and enterprise container-based solutions.

The transaction is expected to close in January 2018, subject to customary closing conditions.