Software container company CoreOS Inc. is updating its popular Tectonic platform, adding a number of open-source services that serve as alternatives to proprietary infrastructure components from public cloud companies.

CoreOS’s Tectonic platform is essentially an enterprise-grade version of the Kubernetes container orchestration tool, which is used to manage clusters of software containers, which in turn allow applications to run on any computer platform. The company also offers the Container Linux operating system, and the Quay container registry service, which together serve as an alternative to the better-known container infrastructure offered by Docker Inc.

With Tectonic 1.8, CoreOS is introducing the Open Cloud Services Catalog so that enterprises can deploy key infrastructure components on the infrastructure of their choice, ostensibly to help those companies avoid vendor lock-in.

The company said its Open Cloud Services Catalog initially includes three services, namely the “etcd” distributed key-value store that serves as the “brain” of Kubernetes; Prometheus, which is an open-source container monitoring system that keeps an eye on the health of containerized applications; and Vault, which is a “secrets” management service that’s used for policy management and user access control.

The company said each of these services inherit the basic principles of their proprietary public cloud counterparts by automating basic tasks such as updates, disaster recovery, scaling and maintenance. The main benefit, according to CoreOS, is that these services can run on any kind of infrastructure platform, including on-premises and cloud-based environments, thereby delivering “true portability” across hybrid infrastructures.

Tectonic 1.8 also comes with improvements to container runtime stability and flexibility, CoreOS said. It manages the installed version of the Docker Engine and automatically updates the platform to the latest release when it’s available.

“Companies are relying on CoreOS to provide the enterprise-ready Kubernetes infrastructure they trust to run their applications in the cloud or hybrid environment of their choice,” Rob Szumski, product manager at Tectonic, said in a statement. “This Tectonic release is significant because it gives infrastructure leaders and managers the ability to expose these unique and powerful enterprise services to their teams, with the benefits of automated operations without worry of being tied to any one cloud provider.”

CoreOS said Tectonic 1.8 will ship later this month. Existing users will be able to update to the new version via a single click from the Tectonic Console and with no downtime, the company added.

Image: CoreOS