Google has just moved to make the lightweight Linux operating system CoreOS available on its main cloud platform, the Google Compute Engine.

CoreOS is a relatively new operating system that’s designed to run on massive clusters of computers. The OS takes up just 168MB of RAM, around 50 percent less than most other Linux distros, according to the CoreOS website. As well, all applications are run within containers, meaning its one of the least power-hungry OS’s around. It will become available as a default image type in the GCE panel in the “next few days”, reports The Register.

Three key technologies make up CoreOS: systemd, which allows developers to control a cluster of machines as if they’re just one; etcd, distributed key-value store technology that ties the clusters together; and Docker, which packages and runs apps inside containers while simultaneously configuring the network.

CoreOS’s developers say they’ve done a bit of work to ensure it integrates smoothly with Compute Engine. This should make it easier to pair apps with some of the more advanced services offered by Google’s cloud.

Brandon Philips, CoreOS’s chief technology officer, explains in a blog post:

“CoreOS integrates easily with Google load balancers and replica pools to easily scale your applications across regions and zones. Using replica groups with CoreOS is easy; configure the project-level metadata to include a discovery URL and add as many machines as you need. CoreOS will automatically cluster new machines and fleet will begin utilizing them. If a single machine requires more specific configuration, additional cloud-config parameters can be specified during boot.”

“Running on Compute Engine allows you to connect your front-end and back-end services running on CoreOS to a fully managed Cloud Datastore or Cloud SQL database. Applications that store user-generated content on Google Cloud Storage can easily start worker instances on the CoreOS cluster to process items as they are uploaded.”

The combination of Compute Engine and CoreOS results in something of a paradox, since Google’s cloud is also built atop of Linux containerization. Essentially, it means running a container-based OS on a hypervisor that sits atop a container. Nevertheless, Google’s product manager Navneet Joneja told The Register that this shouldn’t matter, because “virtualization has gotten really good, the performance overhead tends to be minimal.”