Docker containers are disrupting the world of virtualization, but IT still requires an operating system framework on which to run and manage them. Now, Red Hat Inc., has just launched the public beta of an OS it believes is ideally suited to that task – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host.

Red Hat lifted the lid off of its “Project Atomic” back in April at the Red Hat Summit, saying it was trying to slim down its Linux OS and optimize it to run Docker containerized apps. Atomic Host appears to be the result of those efforts – it’s a lightweight OS environment that’s tuned to run DevOps and deployment tools, container management, orchestration and hosted application services for messaging and integration. It’s based on Google’s Kubernetes project for container host infrastructure, and can be deployed either on a physical server or on top of a virtual machine. To make things run smoothly, Red Hat is also throwing in SELinux support.

“The industry is moving beyond self-contained, isolated and monolithic applications and locked-down application stacks,” said Red Hat in a statement. “New workloads will be part of a connected application fabric that is flexibly woven together to serve particular business needs and yet easily torn apart and recomposed.”

Atomic Host has been specifically designed to run applications composed from container-hosted “micro-services,” says Red Hat, which claims that apps developed and tested for RHEL 6 and 7 can run “seamlessly” on the platform. On Atomic Host, every app runs in a container, with security enforced by SELinux and nothing running directly on the host OS.

Atomic Host is somewhat similar to the lightweight CoreOS Linux distro that’s also built to run containerized apps, with the biggest difference being that Atomic Host is based on RHEL, while CoreOS was built on the Ubuntu platform.

That’s not to say these are the only two offerings for those getting caught up in the container madness. Almost every Linux vendor has or is in the process of cobbling together some kind of support for Docker – most recently, Ubuntu maker Canonical Ltd., revealed its ambitious plans for a so-called “Linux Container Demon”, which virtualizes the behavior of an entire VM inside a container, running it as close to the metal as it possibly can, to get new machines up and running as fast as possible while offering greater density.

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