CoreOS Lands £19m Container Funds From Google Ventures

Container tinkerer CoreOS is the recipient of $28m (£19m) worth of fresh funding, thanks to a Series B investment round led by Google Ventures (now known as GV).

CoreOS has now received total funding of $48m, with the money going towards the company’s Google Kubernetes-based container platform. CoreOS will also look to expand its team globally, hiring in New York, Berlin, and its home of San Francisco.

Docker

Most importantly for CoreOS, the funding helps its compete with Docker, pushing Google’s own take on containers into the enterprise to let customers run containerised applications on both public and private clouds.

Companies like CoreOS are banking on the future ubiquity of containers becoming an enterprise standard. Dave Munichiello, a partner at Google Ventures (GV) went so far as to say container-based approaches are inevitable.

“Software containers empower development teams to focus on building great applications without regard for the underlying IT infrastructure,” Munichiello said.

The company’s CEO, Alex Polvi, said that the current state of container technology is ready for the next phase in in enterprise computing, a shift that will be just as big as virtualisation and cloud was.

“Enterprises are on the path to embracing Google-style infrastructure,” said Polvi.

“Kubernetes is on point to be as ubiquitous as Linux. With this investment, CoreOS is at the forefront of bringing GIFEE to enterprises by providing the most advanced and secure Kubernetes distribution.”

GIFEE, an acronym for Google’s Infrastructure For Everyone Else, is a marketing spiel/strategy/state of mind that basically means anyone can do distributed computing on cloud just like Google.

Intel applauded the funding, looking for a way to piggyback any container success. “Enterprises are looking to adopt some of the IT best practices of hyperscale cloud providers to deliver lower cost of ownership and high agility,” said Jason Waxman, corporate vice president of the Data Center Group at Intel.

“Intel’s investment and collaboration with CoreOS will accelerate the efficiency, security, and consistency of hyperscale computing for the broader industry.”

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