RALEIGH – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is investing $250 million to acquire CoreOS in a move to improve its cloud storage and related technology.

The deal was announced late Tuesday evening. CoreOS is just over four years old.

The San Francisco-based firm, which has some 130 employees, offers technology “to improve the security and reliability of the Internet” by enabling “companies to run their applications securely and reliably in any environment,” the companies noted in an FAQ about the deal.

Red Hat says the deal will boost its efforts to offer solutions for customers who are moving data and applications “to hybrid and multicloud environments” built around containers, which permit the packaging of multiple applications.

Defining Kubernetes

Key to the deal is Kubernetes  which is defined as an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Containers are essential to cloud storage.

Red Hat is a world leader in open source Linux development and solutions.

“The next era of technology is being driven by container-based applications that span multi- and hybrid cloud environments, including physical, virtual, private cloud and public cloud platforms,” explained Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies at Red Hat.

“Kubernetes, containers and Linux are at the heart of this transformation, and, like Red Hat, CoreOS has been a leader in both the upstream open source communities that are fueling these innovations and its work to bring enterprise-grade Kubernetes to customers. We believe this acquisition cements Red Hat as a cornerstone of hybrid cloud and modern app deployments.”

In the FAQ, Red Hat noted:

“We believe Red Hat and CoreOS are a natural fit due to our respective open source business models and emphasis on enabling customers to build and deploy applications across the hybrid cloud. CoreOS can expand Red Hat’s technology leadership in containers and Kubernetes and enhance core platform capabilities in OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat’s integrated container portfolio. Bringing CoreOS’s technologies to the Red Hat portfolio can help us further automate and extend operational management capabilities for OpenShift administrators and drive greater ease of use for end users building and managing applications on our platform. CoreOS also shares Red Hat’s focus on improving security and enabling application portability across the hybrid cloud. We plan to share more specifics for our plans for CoreOS’s integration into the Red Hat portfolio, including OpenShift, in the coming months.”

Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, pointed out the firms are quite familiar with each other. The firm’s “relationship began many years ago as open source collaborators developing some of the key innovations in containers and distributed systems, helping to make automated operations a reality. This announcement marks a new stage in our shared aim to make these important technologies ubiquitous in business and the world. Thank you to the CoreOS family, our customers, partners, and most of all, the free software community for supporting us in our mission to make the internet more secure through automated operations.”

At the core

 

CoreOS developed CoreOS Tectonic, which the companies describe as an enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform that provides automated operations, enables portability across private and public cloud providers, and is based on open source software.

CoreOS also has led the way in development of additional Linux solutions.

Red Hat says it is the second leading contributor of Kubernetes behind Google.