CoreOS Stable Release

https://coreos.com/blog/stable-release/

by brynary • 12 years ago

349 66 12 years ago

coreos.com

jvandyke• 12 years ago

Flynn 1.0 release in 3, 2, 1... crosses fingers

Zariel• 12 years ago

oh please yes

superuser24• 12 years ago

Flynn itself costs $3,000/year at the most basic service level, before you even start covering infrastructure. Why shouldn't I just write what I need in a few hundred dollars worth of hours?

danielsiders3• 12 years ago

Flynn co-founder here. Flynn is free open source software and always will be.

Our managed service is for users who want to outsource the management of the cluster to us. There's no secret extra technology (it's just Flynn underneath), what you pay for is a professional ops team to manage your cluster. The service is also freemium (and free for the vast majority of users).

danielsiders3• 12 years ago

Beta's coming soon and we're still on target to ship a production-grade stable version of the major features in a few months.

jhuckestein• 12 years ago

This is excellent news. Two weeks ago I looked into flynn and the various repos had very little activity compared to deis so I went with that for now.

Edit: I posted this just FYI. I thought it'd be useful to know. Perhaps this is a consequence of splitting the project across a large number of repos, where some of them don't get many commits.

presspot• 12 years ago

DEIS is already a better solution than Flynn... just saying.

netcraft• 12 years ago

It looks like Digital Ocean hopes to eventually support coreOS: http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea...

I can only find a tweet that linode is "considering" it: https://twitter.com/linode/status/488045339023532032

anyone have any other information re vps vendor support?

thejosh2• 12 years ago

DO promises A LOT of features they do not deliver.

freyr• 12 years ago

There's a big difference between a hope and a promise.

kelseyhightower• 12 years ago

I personally think they will pull this one off, mainly because CoreOS will be providing support to the DO team and help however possible to make sure DO is added to the list of supported cloud vendors.

tiffanyh2• 12 years ago

Don't get your hope up.

The #2 feature of all time requested is BSD support.

DO "started" this feature over a year ago.

http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean...

Then on twitter recently they act like they aren't even working on BSD support.

https://mobile.twitter.com/digitalocean/status/4407445438564...

TLDR: DO over promises on features they will deliver

Edit: fixed link

efuquen• 12 years ago

You've read more into that tweet then I ever would, saying " we are a small startup with limited resources" doesn't really imply anything to me on whether they are or have been working on BSD support. Has DO made any promises about delivery date here? Did they imply anything that could be construed as "overpromising"? I mean any company or OS project has plenty of stuff they "have been working on" for many years, I wouldn't say they've overpromised on anything unless they made explicit commitments and failed to meet them.

tuananh• 12 years ago

Alex Polvi stopped by our office a couple of weeks ago and we spoke about integrating CoreOS. He offered to provide a lot of additional support to get this rolled out including managing them images so that we can have official CoreOS images that are maintained by them when they are ready.

Given how their systems are laid out and spun up we discussed the changes that would be needed and it looks like the metadata service that we have begun writing solves a lot of the challenges.

We’re moving this to planned stage, as soon as we finish the metadata service we can begin testing it internally around getting CoreOS as a supported distro in DigitalOcean.

Updated 15 July 2014

Looks pretty promising to me.

jenius• 12 years ago

If anyone from Digital Ocean is reading this, please help if you can! A lot of developers really want to check out CoreOS, and having it supported on DO would help so much. Let us give you money!

raiyu• 12 years ago

Hey,

We are reading this and we will be helping soon. We met with Alex Polvi when he stopped our office a few weeks ago and we discussed integrating CoreOS.

Given how their file systems are laid out and a couple of other items on their side as well as that we are building out a metadata service that will be launching soon we thought it would be best to wait on the integration until after the metadata service was ready.

This way we could use it to integrate with CoreOS and make the deployment process a lot simpler.

Alex has been super helpful offering a lot of support to help us get this done and we are very excited to move forward, but we thought it would be better to do it right with the metadata service instead of launching it without that, knowing that we would have to rebuild the way the image was being provisioned and every early adopter of CoreOS would then need to redeploy their droplets.

Because we have a lot of projects in flight at the same time I don't have an ETA and we've certainly found it difficult to give product release estimates when we are also in high growth mode because there are always many interruptions and reprioritizations that happen on the fly every week but I'm hopeful that this one launching this quarter.

Thanks, Moisey

api• 12 years ago

Vultr.com allows you to launch a VPS with your own uploaded ISO / image, so if you made one for CoreOS it'd probably work. They also support FreeBSD. I've been using them in their Los Angeles location for a while and have had no issues at all. Their costs are about the same as DO... basically a DO clone. I think there's an older hosting company behind them so it's not a basement operation.

robszumski3• 12 years ago

We have some community contributed docs here: http://coreos.com/docs/running-coreos/cloud-providers/vultr

darren0• 12 years ago

You can install CoreOS on Digital Ocean with the following script. https://github.com/ibuildthecloud/coreos-on-do

brynary2• 12 years ago

I'm very excited about this release. CoreOS, Docker and etcd are a great fit for one another. I love the separation of concerns that is provided.

IMHO, the weakest part of CoreOS is fleet (https://github.com/coreos/fleet). Compared to the other components in the stack, it just feels very inelegant. The systemd configuration syntax is complex and ugly. I wonder if there will be work invested to upgrade fleet to something that is as elegant as e.g. etcd/Docker/CoreOS itself.

bcwaldon2• 12 years ago

fleet definitely does not provide a nice integration with docker, and we're definitely trying to decide how we can provide a better integration story. And yes, systemd is complex, but with that complexity comes great power.

brynary2• 12 years ago

Glad to hear you're thinking about this. Understanding the complexity provides power, but the tradeoff in this instance doesn't feel quite right.

For example, etcd is a powerful primitive, and then more complex/sophisticated systems can be built on top of it.

I wonder if an 80/20 solution that is simpler than fleet/systemd for pushing work into a CoreOS cluster would be a win, and then more complex systems (e.g. Kubernetes-esque orchestraction) could live on top of that.

rckclmbr4• 12 years ago

We recently switched (like 2 weeks ago) our project from deployment on ubuntu servers via 'git pull' managed with supervisord to docker/coreos/fleet, and it's been epic. While coreos is built for large clusters, we run a 3 host cluster in ec2, and couldn't be happier. We switched from multiple servers running 1 instance of each service to load balancing all instances on these 3 hosts. This increased uptime, made deployment and management easier, and gave us the benefits of docker as well (verifying things work locally).

There's only 2 real problems, both of them very minor:

* fleet managing state. We've had to manually kill containers sometimes, and destroy systemd services before we could start it again.

* all EC2 amis use ebs backed instances. We haven't used a higher-IOPs ebs backed instance because the only delay we see are in startup times (which doesn't matter, just longer rolling deploys). But an instance-backed ami would be nice.

superuser24• 12 years ago

How do you handle persistent storage in a fault-tolerant way?

You could technically pin your MySQL container to one host, but that seems to defeat the point of fleet. I considered trying to mount an iSCSI target to run the database from, but CoreOS doesn't have a working iSCSI initiator.

I guess I could just run all the persistent stuff on a more traditional OS, but then why mess with CoreOS at all?

rckclmbr4• 12 years ago

We use Amazon RDS and S3. Only applications are run in the cluster.

leg100• 12 years ago

The persistence can follow the DB container:

https://github.com/leg100/docker-ebs-attach

You'll need three fleet units in total:

  - one to attach the EBS volume (wrapping the above container)
  - one to mount the device to a directory on the host
  - one to run the DB container, with a bind mount to the host directory

If the CoreOS host terminates, the cluster will reschedule the units to another host.

outside12343• 12 years ago

Have you written up this in a blog post anywhere? Would be an interesting read and very valuable for dev/test scenarios in addition to production ones.

rckclmbr4• 12 years ago

Not yet. I will shortly.

bcwaldon2• 12 years ago

We're actively working on fixing the fleet state management problems. It's been a pain for us, too.

https://github.com/coreos/fleet/pull/638

LunaSea• 12 years ago

What OS image do you use for Docker ?

Is it still Ubuntu or do you use CoreOS on both the "host" and "base image" ?

cyounkins• 12 years ago

Using CoreOS as a "base image" under docker would serve little purpose because CoreOS isn't really designed to run anything other than its core services. People usually use Ubuntu or CentOS.

micah_chatt• 12 years ago

I'm really curious how you manage the load balancing. Are you using CoreOS's elb mailgun walk through?

rckclmbr4• 12 years ago

Yep, exactly.

outside12343• 12 years ago

Super great to see CoreOS making it to its first stable release. It really feels like the future.

I've been reading about using vulcand to do frontend deploys and traffic management (http://coreos.com/blog/zero-downtime-frontend-deploys-vulcan...) and using ambassadors to do dynamic routing to backend stores (http://coreos.com/blog/docker-dynamic-ambassador-powered-by-...)

But it is hard to get my head around this - has anyone actually tied all of these concepts together in a deployment that they've written up?

JohnTHaller• 12 years ago

I'm a bit confused on the licensing here. CoreOS says it's Apache 2.0 licensed. But it also says its Linux. If it includes the Linux kernel, as it appears to, then those bits is licensed under the GPL and can not be re-licensed as Apache 2.0. So, it's a bit disingenuous to claim the whole package is Apache 2.0, since it isn't.

rm445• 12 years ago

How relevant is the issue in practice though? It doesn't seem too likely that people are going to want to provide commercial forks of the whole project including the inux kernel. And it's pretty likely they could package their changes to the CoreOS code together with a stock kernel.

The claim on the site is that "Code produced by the CoreOS team is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. " - Which seems reasonable enough.

therealmarv2• 12 years ago

relevant for everybody who cares... if you run a business based on this software you care and should care.

sciurus• 12 years ago

Where is the text you find confusing? What I found about licensing says "Code produced by the CoreOS team is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license." That's extremely clear about what the license applies to.

http://coreos.com/products/

rando289• 12 years ago

Yes, for people who understand licensing stuff. For the many people who don't, they could say that 3rd party components of CoreOS are under various open source licenses, but the code they produce is Apache 2.0.

alok-g• 12 years ago

From the home page:

"CoreOS is a new Linux distribution that ..."

"CoreOS is Apache 2.0 licensed and ..."

ClashTheBunny• 12 years ago

It's like Android. Everything that wasn't already GPL and is produced by the project is released with an Apache license. Everything that is GPL is still GPL.

If you fork it, you still have to keep releasing the source for the kernel, and possibly part of the user land, but the rest of the user land is fair game.

otterley2• 12 years ago

I'm puzzled as to why it's called "stable," while at the same time it appears to require btrfs-on-root to be useful (i.e. for hosting Docker containers) but that part is "experimental."

Can someone from CoreOS clarify?

philips• 12 years ago

Where is it marked experimental on the website? Almost certainly a mistake.

robszumski3• 12 years ago

He's talking about the PXE kernel option specifically: http://coreos.com/docs/running-coreos/bare-metal/booting-wit...

Lennie• 12 years ago

Didn't (Open)Suse also use btrfs by default ?

I've seen a talk by someone from Suse. He had a two part sentence. The first part was: btrfs is good and stable (paraphrasing) The second part was: when used with a single device

So that means something like RAID1 on 2 disks is a still a bad idea.

The way CoreOS ends up using btrfs is also on single devices I believe.

devNoise2• 12 years ago

I've been using Vagrant/Virtual to run Ubuntu LTS for my Javascript dev env. Does it make sense switch to CoreOS? I generally run it as a headless server. No X-windows or GUI needed.

therealmarv2• 12 years ago

Stay for now on Ubuntu. Personally I would be sceptical for some time before the hype of a new Linux settles down. Ubuntu is proven for many many years and stands on the shoulders of giants named Debian. CoreOS is a pretty new shiny product which still needs to prove itself.

devNoise2• 12 years ago

Thanks. I'll keep an eye on it, but will hold off on making a switch.

jimmcslim• 12 years ago

I know Hyper-V isn't particularly sexy around these parts but it appears to work there as well. It doesn't support the Hyper-V integration services but that's par for the course for most Linux distributions.

outside12343• 12 years ago

Linux with Hyper-V is included in almost all modern Linux kernels as I understand it.

lucasjans• 12 years ago

Hyper-V support interests, me, as I have a cluster of Windows hosts and would love to add CoreOS to the mix and deploy to my private cloud when needed.

CoreOS is putting some effort into Hyper-V support. There's a way to get it working, though I haven't tried.

Hopefully there's an elegant solution soon.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/coreos-dev/S3lbY2BV4...

CoreOS Stable Release

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