Clear Linux Is Beginning To Make Strides In The Industry From Alibaba To MontaVista

Of Intel's many open-source projects, taking a central role at this year's Intel Open-Source Technology Summit was Clear Linux. Most Intel open-source efforts mentioned during the event point back to Clear Linux in some capacity and at OSTS2019 we finally heard some of the companies that are beginning to make use of Clear Linux.

While we have been benchmarking Clear Linux for the past few years nearly since its inception and have most often been mesmerized by its performance, it hasn't been very clear who in the industry makes use of Clear. In fact, the public vision of Clear Linux wasn't entirely clear until this week's event from various sessions and conversations with Intel's leaders.

While Intel doesn't publicly list its customers using Clear Linux for obvious reasons, some of them were at OSTS and for the first time announcing their deployments or plans to make use of it.

Turns out #Alibaba also leverages and collaborates with @clearlinux pic.twitter.com/qCoSSvRsA8

— Phoronix (@phoronix) May 14, 2019

Alibaba has begun making use of Clear Linux.

Currently #Alibaba Cloud OS is CentOS 7.6 based but looks like their future is using @clearlinux from cloud images to bare metal pic.twitter.com/FCmJYrauJh

— Phoronix (@phoronix) May 14, 2019

In fact, they are planning to migrate their internal Alibaba Cloud OS from being based on CentOS 7 to Clear Linux.

pic.twitter.com/4VFOhGD5YS

— Phoronix (@phoronix) May 14, 2019

Microsoft did also mention one of their milestones as bringing Clear Linux to Azure.

Turns out @mvista #MontaVista is now building on top of @clearlinux pic.twitter.com/NXXblGLkBW

— Phoronix (@phoronix) May 15, 2019

One of the big announcements was about MontaVista using Clear Linux. In fact, they are going to begin offering their customers commercial support for Clear Linux. More details on MontaVista's commercial support offerings around Clear Linux were announced during OSTS.

So for those thinking Clear Linux was just being used as "toy" by Intel to showcase the potential of Linux performance on Intel hardware, no, it's seeing industry adoption and these companies were just the ones making it known this week. Besides the top-level performance, other reasons expressed for their interest in Clear Linux were fast turnaround times on security / security being as important as important and offering this stable platform closer to head compared to other enterprise Linux distributions that incur more technical debt due to being much further behind the latest mainline code-bases. Clear Linux has also been working on interesting innovations in the embedded/IoT space as they also shared during the event.

Seeing this industry adoption plus the new Clear Linux Developer Edition is putting Intel on an interesting open-source/Linux trajectory.