Container technology is one of the fastest-growing trends in cloud computing because it promises to help data center managers avoid the complexity of managing virtual machines in the cloud. But although container technology is far simpler than VMs in principle, many IT pros still experience headaches and confusion when attempting to build a container stack.

In an effort to sooth some of these headaches, CoreOS Inc. has just made its Tectonic Enterprise platform generally available. Tectonic can be thought of as an all-encompassing container technology stack that combines CoreOS with Kubernetes, the Google-backed open-source project for managing container applications.

Tectonic, which has been available in beta since July, provides easy access to Kubernetes together with a way for companies to securely run containers inside a distributed environment that’s similar to how Google runs its own infrastructure. It’s essentially a complete stack of tools that organizations need to get started with containers, including the CoreOS operating system, the etcd key-value store, the Flannel networking fabric, and the Rocket container runtime CoreOS built as an alternative to Docker’s runtime.

CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi describes Tectonic as “Google-like infrastructure”, saying that it enables “a new, consistent way of running applications anywhere, in production”.

Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman offered his own insights on the CoreOS Tectonic platform when it launched in beta earlier this year:

“The interesting part is how various pieces of the stack are pulled together. This is a complex stack compared to the traditional software solution that enterprises are familiar with buying. Kubernetes provides container scheduling, an important piece of the container ecosystem. CoreOS Tectonic pulls together a suite of open source projects into a platform, helping to simplify the adoption of containers.”

Tectonic doesn’t stop at just tackling the complexity of containers, but also tries to address some of the security concerns that have arisen with the technology’s growing popularity. The platform now comes with a brand new feature called Tectonic Identity that’s built on CoreOS’ dex open-source project and provides cluster-wide single sign-on based on the OpenID Connect standard,
integrated into all Tectonic tools. CoreUpdate meanwhile, gives users greater control over the update process of machines running CoreOS, and finally Quay Enterprise is an app that sits atop of Tectonic and acts as a registry that secures containers behind the firewall.

“The lack of manageability, security and isolation often serves as an obstacle towards container adoption,” said Colm Keegan, cloud analyst at ESG. “CoreOS’ Tectonic offering addresses these concerns by providing a consistent and simplified operational framework that can be utilized to securely and more easily manage containers across hybrid cloud infrastructure.”

Tectonic Enterprise is priced on a per tiered aggregate memory basis, though CoreOS is offering organizations the chance to try before they buy.

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