The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora community has released the beta of an upcoming Fedora 27 distribution. Fedora comes in three versions: Workstation, Server, and Atomic Host.

Atomic Host is designed for containerized workloads, and the 17 beta comes with many new features for developers and operators. It’s designed as a minimal footprint operating platform that offers a tailored experience for running container-based workloads in the cloud or on bare metal.

Unlike Workstation and Server editions, Fedora 27 Atomic Host gets upgrades on a two-week refresh cycle. It offers a base image for creating virtual machines, an Atomic Host image for creating hosts for container deployment, and a Docker image.

Some of the new features of Fedora 27 Atomic Host include a consolidated storage setup based on OverlayFS for a more simple container storage setup. Fedora 27 Atomic Host Beta will now default to a large root filesystem that is shared with container storage through OverlayFS.

It also containerized services like Kubernetes, flannel, and etcd by default, which replaces Kubernetes, flannel, and etcd in the base OSTree. Users now have more control over these services.

Fedora 27 Atomic Host also comes with improvements in package layering by way of the latest rpm-ostree , which now supports base package overrides (removes and replaces). This builds on top of the previous features, including support for direct RPM install and experimental LiveFS layering, enabling layering without a reboot.

You can download and test the Fedora 27 Atomic Host beta.