This week saw Red Hat showing off its newest enterprise Linux technologies, and it’s betting big on virtualization containers. At its annual Red Hat Summit yesterday, it showed off a new virtualization initiative leveraging open-source container technology from Docker, known as Project Atomic.

Project Atomic combines components like geard, systemd, and rpm-OSTree with Docker’s containerization technology to effectively put Linux on a diet – creating a streamlined operating system that will afford enterprises many of virtualization’s benefits, but without so much of the overheads.

“VMs provide a means for separation among applications, but this model adds significant resource and management overhead,” notes Red Hat on its new Project Atomic site. “The traditional enterprise OS model with a single runtime environment controlled by the OS and shared by all applications does not meet the requirements of modern application-centric IT.”

Instead of a single runtime environment, Atomic is built entirely around running Docker containers, using components of Fedora, CentOS and Red Hat. Docker containers employ elements of the Linux kernel including cgroups, lxc, and namespaces, which gives multiple applications their own isolated memory, storage, CPU and network allocations while sharing the underlying host OS. Essentially, what we have is a cloud host operating system – an entirely different approach from the traditional virtualization set-up, in which the OS is shared for each app as well, taking up valuable storage and compute space.

“Atomic is effectively a much slimmed down Red Hat Enterprise Linux on which multiple application containers can ride,” Paul Cormier, president of Red Hat’s products and technologies, said to eWEEK. “The beauty is that it’s the same RHEL 7 across bare metal, OpenStack and now the Atomic platform.”

This initiative could well prove to be a valuable one for organizations that have to manage large distributed apps, thanks to the savings provided by Docker. For sure, this is only a niche role at the moment, but over time it’s also one that’s likely to grow in importance. That’s why Red Hat has created Project Atomic now, so it can expose its customers to Docker containerization, while ensuring that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is running wherever Docker runs.

It won’t all be plain sailing for Red Hat though – currently there’s at least one other Linux distribution that’s designed for “warehouse-scale computing”, known as CoreOS, and that also incorporates Docker.

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