Red Hat first announced its Project Atomic effort in April 2014 as part of a broad push into the Docker Linux container space. While Docker is supported on the main Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system edition, that OS is a general-purpose system and is not as tightly optimized for Docker as is Atomic Host.
Subhendu Ghosh, senior technology product manager at Red Hat, explained that a lot has happened since the initial announcement of Project Atomic. One of the big shifts has been Red Hat’s embrace of the Google-led Kubernetes open-source project for container orchestration. Red Hat has embraced Kubernetes for its container offerings, and the company is now the second-largest contributor in the community after Google, Ghosh said.