Bossie Awards 2015: The best open source data center and cloud software

You might have heard about this new thing called Docker containers. Developers love them because you can build them with a script, add services in layers, and push them right from your MacBook Pro to a server for testing. It works because they’re superlightweight, unlike those now-archaic virtual machines. Containers — and other lightweight approaches to deliver services — are changing the shape of operating systems, applications, and the tools to manage them. Our Bossie winners in data center and cloud are leading the charge.

A thin, lightweight server OS, CoreOS is based on Google’s Chromium OS. Instead of using a package manager to install functions, it’s designed to be used with Linux containers. By using containers to extend a thin core, CoreOS allows you to quickly deploy applications, working well on cloud infrastructures.

CoreOS’s container management tooling, fleet, is designed to treat a cluster of CoreOS servers as a single unit, with tools for managing high availability and for deploying containers to the cluster based on resource availability. A cross-cluster key/value store, etcd, handles device management and supports service discovery. If a node fails, etcd can quickly restore state on a new replica, giving you a distributed configuration management platform that’s linked to CoreOS’s automated update service.

While CoreOS is perhaps best known for its Docker support, the CoreOS team is developing its own container runtime, rkt, with its own container format, the App Container Image. Also compatible with Docker containers, rkt has a modular architecture that allows different containerization systems (even hardware virtualization, in a proof of concept from Intel) to be plugged in. However, rkt is still in the early stages of development, so isn’t quite production ready.

— Simon Bisson