[13][17]: 7:02  CoreOS was developed primarily by Alex Polvi, Brandon Philips, and Michael Marineau,[12] with its major features available as a stable release.

That way, resource partitioning between containers is performed through multiple isolated userspace instances, instead of using a hypervisor and providing full-fledged virtual machines.

This approach relies on the Linux kernel's cgroups and namespaces functionalities,[22][23] which together provide abilities to limit, account and isolate resource usage (CPU, memory, disk I/O, etc.)

Internally, locksmith operates as the locksmithd daemon that runs on cluster members, while the locksmithctl command-line utility manages configuration parameters.

[54] By using fleetd, Container Linux creates a distributed init system that ties together separate systemd instances and a cluster-wide etcd deployment;[50] internally, fleetd daemon communicates with local systemd instances over D-Bus, and with the etcd deployment through its exposed API.

A command-line utility called fleetctl is used to configure and monitor this distributed init system;[55] internally, it communicates with the fleetd daemon using a JSON-based API on top of HTTP, which may also be used directly.

[56][57][58][59][60] All of the above-mentioned daemons and command-line utilities (etcd, etcdctl, fleetd and fleetctl) are written in the Go language and distributed under the terms of the Apache License 2.0.

[63][64] CoreOS also supports deployments on various hardware virtualization platforms, including Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, QEMU/KVM, Vagrant and VMware.

Container Linux can also be deployed through its commercial distribution called Tectonic, which additionally integrates Google's Kubernetes as a cluster management utility.

It should allow applications of that type to grow and shrink as needed with demand, as well as provide a stable platform where upgrades are not a constant headache.