CoreOS is the shooting star among cloud operating systems
If you run virtual systems based on OpenStack, OpenNebula, or other cloud environments, you will notice that classic Linux systems like Debian, Ubuntu, and Red Hat are not actually made for use in cloud environments. In particular, the standard Linux variants are not very efficient with virtual machine maintenance.
The life cycle of a virtual system includes a variety of properties and events that are difficult to handle with the classical distributions. For instance, a minimal image for Ubuntu 4.14 might be as small as 300MB, but you can't actually do very much with a minimal image without having to install an assortment of additional packages. Moreover, all this additional software needs configuring. Management tools such as Puppet or Chef can help with configuring virtual machines, or you could rely on scripts at system startup time, but each VM needs all of this information all over again. Additionally, the number of active VMs can vary greatly in clouds, and Puppet and Chef are not particularly well adapted to frequent system fluctuation.
Also, what happens if a VM fails? Installing a cloud-based Pacemaker instance for virtual machines would be cumbersome and time consuming, and many clouds only compensate for failed VMs by way of orchestration.
[...]
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