CoreOS Container Linux officially reached end-of-life (EOL) on May 26, 2020. As the Red Hat EOL announcement makes clear: “Any bugs or security vulnerabilities discovered after that date will not be fixed."
If you’re running CoreOS today, it is now time to move to an alternative base operating system for your container deployments. Most options available to you today, however, have significant differences from CoreOS Container Linux. That means that in-place updates are impossible, and migration of your existing configurations require non-trivial engineering effort.
Most options, that is, except one: Flatcar Container Linux.
What is Flatcar Container Linux?
Conceived as a “friendly fork” of CoreOS, Flatcar Container Linux offers an identical user experience. Transition from existing installations is extremely simple, as every existing feature of CoreOS is taken forward - including cloud-init, Ignition, matchbox, immutable file system with A/B partition upgrades and rollbacks, and automatic update checks.
Flatcar, however, goes beyond the last version of CoreOS Container Linux, as it is actively maintained by Kinvolk’s team of Linux and container technology experts. After all, we are the team that originally collaborated with CoreOS to build the rkt container engine. We are systemd maintainers. And we have added senior engineers from AWS, Google and Red Hat to guarantee our ability to continue to develop and support Flatcar Container Linux.
As our friends at VMware put it , “Flatcar is a popular container OS and the perfect drop-in replacement to CoreOS Container Linux”.
Rapidly growing user community
Thousands of users have already adopted Flatcar as their go-forward platform. Here is what some of them have to say:
Ready to come aboard?
If you’re ready to make the switch to Flatcar, please do try it out , and get in touch . We love to help users get on board, and offer a range of support options to ensure both your transition and ongoing deployment experience are trouble-free.