Matt Asay, writing for InfoWorld on the shift to minimal server operating systems like CoreOS:
Linux vendors, particularly Red Hat, have built their businesses on meeting the needs of operations professionals. Developers, as I wrote recently, have been a secondary concern.
That strategy worked great while operations ruled, but as developers have increasingly taken control, the ops-first strategy looks increasingly suspect. Indeed, Gartner estimates that 38 percent of total IT spend comes from outside IT today, and will balloon to 50 percent by 2017 as lines of business take more responsibility for their systems.
In this new developer-centric world, it’s worrisome that incumbent Linux distributions have yet to deliver a first-class, modern developer experience. As one industry observer who prefers not to be named told me:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is what you create when you ask ops people what they want from an operating system. Ubuntu is what you get when you ask ops what they think their devs want from an OS. CoreOS is what you get when you ask the developers what they want in an OS.
It definitely seems like the way forward.