Container Linux by CoreOS

No, Container Linux by CoreOS reached its end of life in May 2020 and no longer receives security updates or patches. The operating system was originally developed by CoreOS, Inc., which was acquired by Red Hat in 2018. After the acquisition, Red Hat directed users toward Fedora CoreOS as the official successor project.

Fedora CoreOS is the official successor to Container Linux, combining the CoreOS technology with elements of Fedora Atomic Host. Red Hat consolidated its container-focused operating system efforts into this single project after acquiring CoreOS in 2018. Fedora CoreOS maintains the philosophy of automatic, atomic updates while integrating more closely with the Kubernetes and OpenShift ecosystems.

Container Linux by CoreOS was designed as a minimal, immutable operating system optimized for running containerized applications rather than installing traditional software packages. It used a dual-partition A/B update scheme that downloaded and applied whole-system updates atomically, allowing safe rollbacks. This approach prioritized security and reliability for large-scale cloud deployments.

Yes, Container Linux was closely integrated with Kubernetes and was one of the first operating systems designed specifically to serve as a Kubernetes host. CoreOS developed etcd, the distributed key-value store that serves as the backbone of Kubernetes clusters, and rkt, an alternative container runtime. The distribution was widely used as a lightweight host for Kubernetes clusters in production environments.