10 Facts About Container Linux

Container Linux is a discontinued open-source lightweight operating system based on the Linux kernel and designed for providing infrastructure to clustered deployments, while focusing on automation, ease of application deployment, security, reliability and scalability.

Container Linux adds new functionality and customization to this shared foundation to support server hardware and use cases.

Container Linux provides no package manager as a way for distributing payload applications, requiring instead all applications to run inside their containers.

Container Linux uses ebuild scripts from Gentoo Linux for automated compilation of its system components, and uses systemd as its primary init system with tight integration between systemd and various Container Linux's internal mechanisms.

Container Linux achieves additional security and reliability of its operating system updates by employing FastPatch as a dual-partition scheme for the read-only part of its installation, meaning that the updates are performed as a whole and installed onto a passive secondary boot partition that becomes active upon a reboot or kexec.

Related searches

Updates distribution system employed by Container Linux is based on Google's open-source Omaha project, which provides a mechanism for rolling out updates and the underlying request–response protocol based on XML.

Container Linux provides etcd, a daemon that runs across all computers in a cluster and provides a dynamic configuration registry, allowing various configuration data to be easily and reliably shared between the cluster members.

Container Linux provides the cluster manager which controls Container Linux's separate systemd instances at the cluster level.

When running on dedicated hardware, Container Linux can be either permanently installed to local storage, such as a hard disk drive or solid-state drive, or booted remotely over a network using Preboot Execution Environment in general, or iPXE as one of its implementations.

Container Linux can be deployed through its commercial distribution called Tectonic, which additionally integrates Google's Kubernetes as a cluster management utility.