Chapter 1. CoreOS, Yet Another Linux Distro?

As more and more applications move toward the cloud with server virtualization, there is a clear necessity for deploying user applications and services very fast and reliably with assured SLA by deploying the services in the right set of servers. This becomes more complex when these services are dynamic in nature, which results in making these services auto-provisioned and auto-scaled over a set of nodes. The orchestration of the user application is not limited to deploying the services in the right set of servers or virtual machines, rather to be extended to provide network connectivity across these services to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Compute, network, and storage are the three main resources to be managed by the cloud provider in order to provide IaaS. Currently, there are various mechanisms to handle these requirements in a more abstract fashion. There are multiple cloud orchestration frameworks that can manage compute, storage, and networking resources. OpenStack, Cloud Stack, and VMware vSphere are some of the cloud platforms that perform orchestration of these resource pools and provide IaaS. For example, the Nova service in OpenStack manages the compute resource pool and creates VMs; the Neutron service provides the required information to provide virtual network connectivity across VMs; and so on.

The IaaS cloud providers should provide all three resources on-demand to the customers, which provide a pay-as-you-go model. The cloud provider maintains these resources as a pool and allocates the resource to a customer on-demand. This provides flexibility for the customer to start and stop the services based on their business needs and can save their OPEX. Typically, in an IaaS model, the cloud service provider offers these resources as a virtualized resource, that is, a virtual machine for compute, a virtual network for network, and virtual storage for storage. The hypervisor running in the physical server/compute nodes provides the required virtualization.

Typically, when an end user requests an IaaS offering with a specific OS, the cloud provider creates a new VM (Virtual Machine) with the OS requested by the user in their cloud server infrastructure. The end user can install their application in this VM. When the user requests more than one VM, the cloud provider should also provide the necessary network connectivity across these VMs in order to provide connectivity across the services running inside these VMs. The cloud orchestration framework takes care of instantiating the VMs in one of the available compute nodes in the cluster, along with associated services like providing virtual network connectivity across these VMs. Once the VM has been spawned, configuration management tools like Chef or Puppet can be used to deploy the application services over these VMs. Theoretically, this works very well.

There are three main problems with this approach:

• All the VMs in the system should run their own copy of the operating system with their own memory management and virtual device drivers. Any application or services deployed over these VMs will be managed by the OS running in the VM. When there are multiple VMs running in a server, all the VMs run a separate copy of OS, which results in overhead with respect to CPU and memory. Also, as the VMs run their own operating system, the time taken to boot/bring up a VM is very high.
• The operating system doesn't provide service-level virtualization that is running a service/application over a set of VMs which are part of cluster. The OS running in the VM is a general purpose operating system that lacks the concept of clustering and deploying the application or service over this cluster. In short, the operating system provides machine-level virtualization and not service-level virtualization.
• The management effort required to deploy a service/software from a development to a production environment is very high. This is because each software package typically has dependencies with other software. There are thousands of packages; each package comes with a different set of configuration, with most combinations of configurations having dependency with respect to performance and scaling.

CoreOS addresses all these problems. Before looking into how CoreOS solves these problems, we will look at a small introduction to CoreOS.