In the Press
Ctrl IQ emerged from stealth today as part of an effort to create an orchestration platform based on a fork of the distribution of Linux provided by Red Hat. Founded by Gregory Kurtzer, one of the original creators of a CentOS project that provided developers with access to a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the company is committing to providing support for a Linux distribution based on CentOS dubbed Rocky Linux.
Last month, Red Hat set off a firestorm when it announced it would no longer be contributing to the CentOS project. Instead, Red Hat is now providing individual developers and small teams access to RHEL itself.
However, many organizations have opted to deploy CentOS in production environments as an alternative to paying for an RHEL subscription. Ctrl IQ is encouraging those organizations, along with individual developers, to switch their loyalty to Rocky Linux. There are now already 750 developers making contributions to Rocky Linux, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has pledged its support, Kurtzer told VentureBeat.
Beyond supporting another distribution of Linux, Ctrl IQ is also committing to developing an orchestration engine dubbed Fuzzball that will be able to manage multiple classes of clusters at a higher level of abstraction without requiring IT teams to master a different orchestration engine for each type of cluster employed, Kurtzer said. The plan is to make Fuzzball a cloud service through which an IT team could, for example, spin up a Kubernetes cluster in an HPC environment to run an AI workload as part of an automated DevOps process.