aid: coreos
name: CoreOS
description: >-
  CoreOS was a San Francisco-based container infrastructure company founded in 2013 that built a
  lightweight, automatically-updating Linux distribution (Container Linux, originally CoreOS Linux)
  and a family of now-foundational cloud-native open source projects: etcd (the distributed key-value
  store at the heart of Kubernetes), the Quay container registry, the Tectonic enterprise Kubernetes
  platform, the rkt container engine, flannel networking, Clair image-vulnerability scanning, and
  Ignition provisioning. Red Hat acquired CoreOS in January 2018 for approximately $250 million.
  Its technologies were folded into Red Hat's portfolio — Container Linux became Red Hat CoreOS and
  the community Fedora CoreOS, Tectonic merged into OpenShift, Quay continues as Red Hat Quay, and
  etcd and rkt were donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The company no longer operates
  independently; coreos.com redirects to Red Hat OpenShift. The github.com/coreos organization remains
  active as the upstream home for Fedora CoreOS components such as Ignition, Butane, and fleetlock.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/coreos/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source: []
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
image: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/3730757?v=4
x-type: company
x-source: vc-portfolio
x-backed-by:
- a16z
- gv
- kleiner-perkins
- y-combinator
x-tier: stub
x-tier-reason: portfolio-lead
x-status: acquired
x-acquired-by: red-hat
x-acquired-date: '2018-01'
x-acquired-note: >-
  Acquired by Red Hat (Jan 2018, ~$250M) and fully absorbed. No independent CoreOS API, developer
  portal, SDKs, or well-known surface exists; coreos.com 301-redirects to Red Hat OpenShift. Open
  source projects live on under github.com/coreos, Fedora CoreOS, Red Hat, and the CNCF.
specificationVersion: '0.20'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-18'
tags:
- Company
- Containers
- Kubernetes
- Cloud Native
- Linux
- Container Registry
- Infrastructure
- Open Source
- DevOps
apis: []
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
common:
- type: Website
  url: http://coreos.com
- type: GitHubOrganization
  url: https://github.com/coreos
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-07-19'
  status: backfilled
  pass: local-v1
  note: backfilled from .gitignore signal + verified work evidence