Enterprise Linux company Red Hat Inc. today made what’s probably the most significant acquisition in information technology so far this year, announcing a deal to buy Kubernetes-focused startup CoreOS Inc. for $250 million.

The move is viewed as an attempt by Red Hat to bring in more talent and expertise to enhance its OpenShift software, which is a distribution of the popular open-source Kubernetes orchestration tool for so-called containerized software. The popularity of software containers has grown rapidly among developers because they allow for applications to be built in an isolated environment that decouples them from the underlying hardware so they can run anywhere unchanged.

Founded in 2013 by Chief Executive Officer Alex Polvi and Chief Technology Officer Brandon Phillips, CoreOS was one of the first and most notable startups to emerge alongside the rise of container-based software. Docker Inc.’s Docker Engine is the most popular container format, but CoreOS emerged when it developed its own standard to compete against it.

Unfortunately for CoreOS, the company’s container format was never able to make much progress against Docker, so the startup instead turned its attention to Kubernetes. CoreOS’s efforts over the last couple of years have focused on its Tectonic product, which is a distribution of Kubernetes that comes with enhancements such as the ability to update and manage itself automatically. Tectonic is essentially an easy-to-manage version of Kubernetes, which is notoriously complicated to use despite being a central component of the enterprise shift toward lighter-weight IT infrastructure.

Tectonic is a solid product, but the consensus is that CoreOS was unable to make money from the platform and ultimately might run short on capital. And with cloud computing leader Amazon Web Services Inc. launching its own managed version of Kubernetes in late November, and Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. already offering their own flavors of Kubernetes, the prospects for Tectonic were clearly not looking good.

Overview of CoreOS Tectonic.
Source: CoreOS

“CoreOS has a bunch of interesting open-source tools that they really hadn’t monetized,” said Stu Miniman, senior analyst at research firm Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE.

No doubt Red Hat was feeling the heat too, not only from the public cloud players but also from CoreOS itself, as Tectonic is a rival to its own OpenShift platform. Whatever the case, there are obvious advantages to both Red Hat and CoreOS.

On the one hand, Red Hat gets to integrate Tectonic with OpenShift to build a superior product, and it also gains access to CoreOS’s engineering talent, including those experienced in open-source software. Meanwhile, Tectonic itself gains exposure to a much bigger audience from Red Hat’s massive installed base and will also benefit from its large and experienced sales teams.

The deal should therefore go some way toward helping Red Hat achieve its goal of becoming the top provider in containers and Kubernetes, said Ray Wang, principal analyst, founder and chairman of Constellation Research Inc.

“Customers increasingly need multicloud strategies and an open-source option,” Wang said. “This enables deployment choices of cloud, on-premises and hybrid across multiple clouds. It also enables the creation of next-generation apps that can sit anywhere.”

The acquisition could also help Red Hat to strike a blow against Docker’s dominance of the container scene. It could also force Docker to align with one of Red Hat’s competitors.

Red Hat hasn’t yet said how it intends to integrate CoreOS’s technology with its own. According to Matt Hicks, senior vice president of engineering at Red Hat, the companies are still evaluating their new product roadmap, though it seems inevitable that OpenShift and Tectonic will eventually be melded into one product.

In the meantime, Red Hat said it continue to honor all commitments regarding support of CoreOS’s products, and will continue to support the open-source communities that exist around them.

Image: Jared Smith/Flickr