Google has revealed that it prefers using its own Chromium OS operating system to run containers in its own cloud, and that it’s the primary choice for running its own services.

Google yesterday lifted the lid off a new OS called “Container-VM”, which it says is a “container-optimized OS image for the Google Cloud Platform (GCP)”. Container-VM is based upon the more familiar Chromium OS, but it certainly isn’t an operating system that anyone would want to use in their own data center – instead, it’s a highly specialized OS that’s designed to run Docker and Kubernetes within Google’s own cloud.

According to Google, Container-VM gives it “greater control over the build management, security compliance, and customizations for GCP”. The OS is designed to support Google cloud services like the Google Compute Engine metadata framework, Google Compute Engine image packages, cloud-init, Docker runtime, Kubernetes and Automatic updates.

A Debian-based version of Container-VM, which is described as a “container-optimized OS”, has been around for sometime, but Google’s Chromium OS-based variant was built specifically for Google Services on GCP.

The OS has been made available for those who want to run containers on Google’s cloud. Google is of course, one of the world’s biggest users of containers, and spins up billions of them each week.

It’s notable that Google is not the first cloud vendor to want to tighten integration between its cloud and its preferred OS. Amazon Web Services has offered its own Amazon Linux for sometime, and not surprisingly that OS works very well indeed inside AWS. Oracle has its own OS too, and Microsoft now runs its Azure Cloud on Windows Server 2016’s Nano Server. So Google is hardly innovating here, although it is fair to say that its container story is a lot more compelling than any of its rival’s.