With RancherOS, Cloud.com Founders Deliver Docker-Focused Innovation

All the way back in 2011, Citrix Systems announced that it had completed the acquisition of Cloud.com. Cloud.com already had many notable customers who favored its cloud stack infrastructure, and much of Citrix's cloud focus grew out of that acquisition. Cloud.com became rebranded as CloudStack. Then, a few months ago, many of the founders of Cloud.com left Citrix.

Fast-forward to today, and two of the founders of Cloud.com have served up a new open source tool called RancherOS, which is billed as "the first operating system to fully embrace Docker, and to run all system services as Docker containers."

According to the Rancher site:

"The first question that arises when you are thinking about putting Docker in production is which OS to use. The simplest answer is to run Docker on your favorite Linux distribution.  However, it turns out the real answer is a bit more nuanced. After running Docker on just about every distro over the last year, I eventually decided to create a minimalist Linux distribution that focuses explicitly on running Docker from the very beginning."

"Docker is a fast-moving target. With a constant drum beat of releases, it is sometimes difficult for Linux distributions to keep up. In October 2013, I started working very actively with Docker, eventually leading to an open source project called Stampede.io. At that time I decided to target one Linux distribution that I thought to be the best for Docker since it was included by default."

"With RancherOS we addressed this by limiting the OS to just the things we need to run Docker, specifically, the Linux kernel, Docker and the bare minimum amount of code needed to join the two together. Picking which version of RancherOS to run is as easy as saying which version of Docker you wish to run. The sole purpose of RancherOS is to run Docker and therefore our release schedule is closely aligned. All other software included in the distribution is considered stable, even if you just picked up the latest and greatest Docker version."

RancherOS is yet more proof of how much action there is surrounding Docker.  We've reported on how the CoreOS team has developed a Docker competitior dubbed Rocket. Rocket is a new container runtime, designed for composability, security, and speed, according to the CoreOS team. You can read more about it here. 

"When we looked at simplifying large scale deployments of Docker, there were no solutions available that truly embraced Docker," report the Cloud.com founders. They've proven before that they can do big things with open source projects, so we'll watch what happens with RancherOS.