Linux-based CoreOS raises $8 million, launches world's first 'OS as a Service'

Himanshu Arora

Posts: 902   +7

CoreOS, an open source lightweight Linux-based operating system designed for massive server deployments, yesterday announced that it has secured $8 million in venture capital funding in series A round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with follow-on investments from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Fuel Capital.

The company plans to offer support services to clients who do not want to deal with the admin work of servers themselves. Taking the first step in this direction, the company announced CoreOS Managed Linux, a commercial version of its open source operating system, which the company describes as the 'world's first OS as a Service'.

“This is a big day for us. Not only are we announcing funding from one of the top Silicon Valley venture capital firms, we also have worked hard to deliver Managed Linux”, said Alex Polvi, founder and CEO of CoreOS today. “Businesses today can begin to think of CoreOS as an extension of their OS team, and for enterprise Linux customers this is the last migration they will ever need”.

The monthly charges for the service vary depending upon the number of servers one has. For example, the company charges $100 for managing up to 10 servers. This includes automatic updates, patches and limited support. The company also offers a premium plan that includes phone, chat and email support, as well as access to CoreUpdate, a dashboard that lets you control software updates.

Prices rise sharply as the number of servers increase. For example, 50 servers will set you back $2,100 per month and $6,600 per month for basic and premium subscription, respectively.

An interesting thing about CoreOS is that it doesn't ship with a package manager. Rather, it uses Docker to handle how applications and services are added to the system and managed on it.

Started back in August 2013, the CoreOS project definitely has a bit of momentum going for it right now. Google recently announced that the Y Combinator alum is now officially available on its Compute Engine, putting it right next to industry heavyweights like Debian, RedHat and Suse.

Permalink to story.

 
Hmm looks like if you have 50 servers or more then your gonna want to invest in something cheaper like I dunno manually doing those updates... will be like what 75% cheaper in the long run.
 
Hmm looks like if you have 50 servers or more then your gonna want to invest in something cheaper like I dunno manually doing those updates... will be like what 75% cheaper in the long run.
Not sure man. 50 servers for premium is $6600 a month, that is $79,200 a year. That would cover 1-2 people's yearly salary depending on where you live and the experience level. I don't run a business, but I know enough that that $79,200 is probably closer to what you would actually spend on 1 employee at $65,000 just due to health insurance, matching 401k contributions, any specialized training, and probably some other things I'm forgetting.
 
Not sure man. 50 servers for premium is $6600 a month, that is $79,200 a year. That would cover 1-2 people's yearly salary depending on where you live and the experience level. I don't run a business, but I know enough that that $79,200 is probably closer to what you would actually spend on 1 employee at $65,000 just due to health insurance, matching 401k contributions, any specialized training, and probably some other things I'm forgetting.

in the UK for $6600 a month we could get 3-4 people....
 
Not sure man. 50 servers for premium is $6600 a month, that is $79,200 a year. That would cover 1-2 people's yearly salary depending on where you live and the experience level. I don't run a business, but I know enough that that $79,200 is probably closer to what you would actually spend on 1 employee at $65,000 just due to health insurance, matching 401k contributions, any specialized training, and probably some other things I'm forgetting.

in the UK for $6600 a month we could get 3-4 people....

that means 316 ponds per week, which come to minimum wage of 7 pounds which is way too less and I don't think you'll get quality people to handle mission critical stuff. People who have 50 servers would want quality guys/gals handling their servers
 
This looks like a great service to me. As someone who manages patches and updates for servers, making sure that nothing breaks (especially on Linux) whenever you update takes a while. With 10 servers, one patch day costs the company a lot more than $100.00. And when it comes to critical patches like Heartbleed and the other OpenSSL security patch following it, this company can roll out updates to thousands of servers quickly, as opposed to administrators first finding out about it, doing a bit of research, and applying the updates manually across their servers.
 
This sounds like a bad idea. Let me run you through what I envision (certainly if I was running a medium-large company) would be.

"OK. So we have budgeted about £40,000 this year for the upkeep of our servers, website and so on. Although it would be cheaper just to hire somebody to do it, let's give all that money to a new, unrated company with no reputation and give them full control over the front of our business, so if something goes wrong, well let's just open a support ticket and wait a month."

Dead in the water, move on, congratulations hipster venture capitalists for blowing your money on a service that will get about 4 businesses on it, one of which is their own.
 
This sounds like a bad idea. Let me run you through what I envision (certainly if I was running a medium-large company) would be.

"OK. So we have budgeted about £40,000 this year for the upkeep of our servers, website and so on. Although it would be cheaper just to hire somebody to do it, let's give all that money to a new, unrated company with no reputation and give them full control over the front of our business, so if something goes wrong, well let's just open a support ticket and wait a month."

Dead in the water, move on, congratulations hipster venture capitalists for blowing your money on a service that will get about 4 businesses on it, one of which is their own.
Sure. I am a mid level environmental coordinator at my company, and we hire chem lab technicians often. The people we hire know what the job entails going in, but they quit after a few days or even weeks. We spent a ton of time training them only to have them quit because they think the job is too 'something'... well, I imagine the same type of thing can happen in the IT world. I guess you are putting all your eggs in someone else's basket, but their entire basket was created for the specific purpose of fulfilling your needs. If my company could hire some company that is specifically 'lab technicians' and contract them out to do the job properly, we would do that in an instant.
 
that means 316 ponds per week, which come to minimum wage of 7 pounds which is way too less and I don't think you'll get quality people to handle mission critical stuff. People who have 50 servers would want quality guys/gals handling their servers

Ye but then again I could spend just £300 a month on 10 chinese people due to them working amazingly cheap when they have talent but lets not forget this service is all software side so no one comes to your aid and upgrades your hardware for ya or diagnoses it...
 
Sure. I am a mid level environmental coordinator at my company, and we hire chem lab technicians often. The people we hire know what the job entails going in, but they quit after a few days or even weeks. We spent a ton of time training them only to have them quit because they think the job is too 'something'... well, I imagine the same type of thing can happen in the IT world. I guess you are putting all your eggs in someone else's basket, but their entire basket was created for the specific purpose of fulfilling your needs. If my company could hire some company that is specifically 'lab technicians' and contract them out to do the job properly, we would do that in an instant.

Fair point, however I would consider lab technicians replaceable. What they do is in the immediate power and view of the company. You aren't telling all of them all your trade secrets and giving them full access to every piece of private data the company has, and if something goes wrong all your eggs have not been given to random low level technicians.

Actually, come to think of it, that's another very good point. Isn't it a breach of the Data Protection Act (UK we are talking about here) to give customer details to a third party (I.e. this company), meaning that for companies to operate like this (run a business that stores anything related to customers or their orders) in the UK, they would need in house servers and technicians and so on, making this whole process pointless and an unnecessary expense? It's like you are paying more to have somebody not putting your company first and risk huge amounts of your business.
 
Back in the days of vender specific Unix (SunMicro, HP, IBM, SGI...) and Linux had yet to be borne, we had something called a Diskless Workstation. We see a remnant of it today when BIOS attempts to access PXE Boot. The entire OS was loaded over a network connection to an image on a server, which was configured to have all the programs necessary.

The PROs: one image to maintain and maintenance was automatically applied upon each boot of the workstation.

The CONs: as there is no HD on the workstation, even the paging was over the network. It's obvious that the network is quickly saturated and performance stinks. For R&D work, coding, compiling and testing, this might be acceptable, but for day-to-day business use, OMG!

A partial solution was to install lots of RAM and to use a Ram Disk for the paging device, but in those days, RAM was expensive too.

The true savings was a single I.T. person could maintain and perform backups for the entire group.

It will be interesting to follow the progress of CoreOS
 
Back