CoreOS

CoreOS was founded in 2013 by Alex Polvi, Brandon Philips, and Jake Moshenko, who had known each other since running the Linux users group at Oregon State University. The company's thesis was that internet-scale infrastructure should be automatically operated and continuously updated, like Google's, rather than hand-maintained server by server. Its first product, CoreOS Linux (later renamed Container Linux), shipped its first alpha in July 2013: a stripped-down, immutable operating system designed to run containerized workloads across clusters and to update itself atomically. CoreOS went through Y Combinator and positioned itself at the center of the emerging container movement.

CoreOS authored a string of projects that became infrastructure bedrock. etcd, its distributed key-value store, was adopted as the consistent datastore underpinning Kubernetes cluster state and became the de facto standard for the orchestrator. In December 2014, after raising concerns about the security and monolithic daemon model of Docker, CoreOS launched rkt (pronounced 'Rocket'), a competing container runtime built around an open App Container specification; rkt reached 1.0 in February 2016. The company also ran Quay, a private container image registry, positioning itself as a full-stack alternative for teams building on containers.