CoreOS, the company's name, is a bit of misnomer now. Their original product, CoreOS, is their namesake and a good foundation for the rest of their platform.
As a company, they've been putting out a number of products, such as etcd, fleet, flannel, and more. It seems that Clair is another product under their umbrella.
So it's not a pivot, it's just another product as a part of their larger offering.
CoreOS's products are all open-source and openly developed, which is awesome. They make their money from their managed service offerings, such as Quay.io container registry (which Clair seems to bolster), CoreOS managed linux, and Tectonic (Kubernetes as a service).
So each product announcement you see is another facet of CoreOS's larger offering.
Quay.io has been outstanding for us so far. Much better overall than Docker Hub for our organization. Particularly in ergonomics and team/permissions granularity.
Please don't use Quay for official open source images if you care about international users, or at least offer a Docker Hub option as well. Quay is super slow compared to Docker Hub. When I contacted support back in July, they were very polite and professional, but in the end "everything is being served from AWS's US East region". Peak time performance is intolerable. It was so bad that our systemd units were timing out even with a massive 5min TimeoutStartSec.
To worsen the issue, Quay still doesn't seem to support parallel layer downloads, and Docker 1.9 even complains that "this image was pulled from a legacy registry. Important: This registry version will not be supported in future versions of docker."
I just ran a quick test (way off peak time) and Quay was 2.5x slower than Docker Hub for an image built from the same Dockerfile.
I'm looking forward to more usable international service at some point, but right now it just isn't really worth it.
Kelsey was a leader in product at CoreOS. He did a lot of what you say, yes, but there was a lot more he did out of the spotlight. He spent the most time talking to users and could have been considered their best advocate, for example.
I enjoyed arguing with him because he and I were cut of the same cloth and have largely the same goals for the operations industry. He brought some great perspective and experience to product, so I'd suggest against shoehorning him as a pitchman. I was kind of bummed out to read that people think the demos are all he did, given how much respect I have for him and the work I've observed.
Perhaps I was too blunt. I didn't intend a negative tone. I'm a big fan of Kelsey and very appreciative of his work. My comment was about what practical effect I think him being employed by Google vs CoreOS will have, which I think is very little. His recent change was just to better align him with the work he had already been doing.
I came to CoreOS because of the open source nature of the company and the awesome collection of projects such as etcd, CoreOS Linux, and their work around containers. The release of Clair proves this will continue without me.
While much of my work at CoreOS was seen through the eyes of people attending conferences and readers of my blog entires, my true contribution was helping grow a community around containers, and more importantly exposing the benefits of distributed computing to a much larger audience.
Based on feedback, I consider my community efforts largely successful for many reasons including the following:
* I've been willing to help anyone learn this stuff by doing 1:1 hangouts, engaging in social media, or writing a book on Kubernetes. Whatever it takes.
* Building and sharing open source projects like confd[1], and my collection of prototypes such as motorboat[2], or exploring new integrations between tools like Docker Compose and Kubernetes[3].
I also spent a fair amount of time hacking on open source projects at CoreOS including rkt, etcd, and working with the community to ensure they could adopt our technologies, then incorporating feedback from users when we (CoreOS) made it hard too. As a result I gained Product Management responsibilities to go along with my advocacy work.
During my time at CoreOS Kubernetes came out, which represented a turning point for what I consider the majority of the industry (well the part that cares about application containers). Kubernetes represented many of the ideas we had been working towards at CoreOS, and in many ways was the perfect addition to the CoreOS stack.
I was an early code contributor of Kubernetes, which resulted in gaining commit access. But once the number of outside contributors grew, I felt I would have a larger impact building tools to fill in the gaps between Kubernetes and people adopting the platform. One of those tools being kube-register[4], which made it easy for people to automate the scaling out of a Kubernetes cluster using fleet.
Overtime I started to shift focus towards education, because what use is a platform for next generation infrastructure if no one knew how to use it? So came the workshops, book, and more conference talks.
In many ways I'm doing the exact same things -- working to improve the future of computing based on containers and core concepts of distributed computing, but at a different company, Google, which has many of the same core values regarding open source, community, and vision.
What happens to CoreOS?
I expect CoreOS to keep shipping stuff based on the same core values that attracted me there in the first place, and regardless of who provides my paycheck I'll always be a member of the CoreOS family. This is the power of community. I never had to leave.
The evolution in tasks a Developer Advocate takes on are still very much misunderstood by many people who think of Advocates/Evangelists/Relations as primarily "pitch & demo" people.
Thanks Kelsey for distilling your perspective on your time at CoreOS -> Google here.
CoreOS, the company's name, is a bit of misnomer now. Their original product, CoreOS, is their namesake and a good foundation for the rest of their platform.
As a company, they've been putting out a number of products, such as etcd, fleet, flannel, and more. It seems that Clair is another product under their umbrella.
So it's not a pivot, it's just another product as a part of their larger offering.
CoreOS's products are all open-source and openly developed, which is awesome. They make their money from their managed service offerings, such as Quay.io container registry (which Clair seems to bolster), CoreOS managed linux, and Tectonic (Kubernetes as a service).
So each product announcement you see is another facet of CoreOS's larger offering.