CoreOS Fleet Fades Away in Favor of Kubernetes and Tectonic

When container vendor CoreOS first got started, among its primary innovations was the Fleet cluster management system. Now in 2017, Fleet is on its way out, as CoreOS has standardized on Kubernetes as the basis for its commercial aspirations with the Tectonic platform.

At the core of Fleet is the open-source etcd distributed key-value store that CoreOS developed, which has now also become the cornerstone of Kubernetes. In a 2014 interview with ServerWatch, Brandon Philips, CTO of CoreOS, explained that Fleet was the natural step after developing etcd.

And now in 2017 it has become obvious that Kubernetes is the next natural step after Fleet.

“Fleet is clustered systemd, and we started building it about 8 months before Google introduced Kubernetes,” Philips said in a video interview.

Though Kubernetes got started after Fleet, Philips noted that “…it (Kubernetes) really completed our sentence.” Kubernetes tackled big problems like load balancing, networking and service discovery among other issues.

CoreOS does have a transition plan to help its Fleet users move to Kubernetes and Tectonic. The first step involves Fleet being removed from CoreOS’s container Linux operating system distribution. Moving forward, Fleet will be offered running inside of a container, so those that want to continue using Fleet can do so.

Watch the video with Brandon Philips, CTO of CoreOS, below:

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.