Fedora.next, the major revamping of Fedora Linux, is shaping up to feature tight integration with container-based virtualization for the cloud, according to a recent discussion among developers of the open source operating system, which forms the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

For the moment, Fedora.next, an overhaul of the OS that the Fedora community began discussing earlier this year, remains very much in the planning stages. But developers are already envisioning changes in Fedora 21, the next planned release of the platform that is due in November, that will lay the foundation for Fedora Cloud.

(To be clear: Fedora 21 will be a traditional Fedora release, not part of the Fedora.next project. When the Fedora community transitions away from its current development model and toward Fedora.next, it will offer Fedora Cloud as one of the “flavors” of Fedora Linux, alongside a version tailored for desktop computing, among possibly others.)

One of the changes that will likely appear in Fedora 21 to set the stage for Fedora.next, according to a recent update from developers Matthew Miller on Fedora Cloud progress, is the inclusion of ostree, a tool for helping to build OS images for the cloud.

In addition, Fedora developers appear eager to make container-based virtualization, via the open source Docker platform, a key part of Fedora Cloud. They announced that they plan on implementing Project Atomic, an orchestration and deployment tool for container-based applications, into Fedora.

The chief aim of developers as they plan Fedora Cloud, Miller wrote, is to offer more than merely a minimalist version of Fedora tailored for deployment in the cloud. Instead, “the idea of Fedora Cloud is to see what we can provide beyond that,” which is precisely what integrated tools for cloud-image manipulation and containerized-application deployment will do, helping to make Fedora Cloud more than just another Linux distribution available in cloud form.