CoreOS Unveils the Security-minded Container Engine: rkt 1.0

SAN FRANCISCO, CA: CoreOS, a provider of secure internet infrastructure, launches the latest version of rkt (pronounced ‘rock-it’); rkt 1.0, the secure and efficient open source container runtime for Linux.

CoreOS developers have been working on runtime with cloud infrastructure community since 2014 to help improve the security and reliability of the Internet. rkt 1.0 is a lightweight container based OS that delivers automatic updates of latest version of the software with increased security. This helps developers, Devops and operation professional to better focus on innovating their applications without the limitations of interconnected dependencies.  

Stable Interface

CoreOs is promoting rkt for its advance securities capabilities with features such as KVM-based container isolation and SELinux support trusted platform model integration. CoreOS is alsocalling attention to its stable UI. Changes to the interface are also backward compatible and will be subject to formal deprecation. CoreOS says rkt also runs on all modern Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Fedora, and CoreOS. Rkt will soon be an integral part of Tectonic with Distributed Trusted Computing, a secure platform from the application layer down to the hardware that is delivered by CoreOS.

A robust structure

Together with CoreOS partners, rkt ecosystem now helps companies run rkt in production with the necessary tools such as rkt monitoring tool developed by Sysdig, rkt networking, rkt container registry by Quay enterprises to allow Docker images to be converted to rkt images on the fly. And Intel has pitched in to provide additional security.

"Container-based environments such as rkt offer incredible portability for data  center workloads,” says Das Kamhout, Principal Engineer and software defined infrastructure architect at Intel, in the CoreOS statement. “Our work with CoreOS has optimized rkt to take full advantage of Intel platform technologies to deliver improved workload isolation and hardware-based security capability, critical capabilities for broad market deployments.”