The power to run Kubernetes wherever, whether or not within the cloud or on-premises, has been a excessive precedence for Azure clients seeking to quickly innovate, with rising buyer deal with the advantages of container-optimized workloads and working techniques, lean software modernization, simpler operations, and platform resiliency.
To assist this speedy evolution, we’re asserting that Microsoft has acquired Kinvolk GmbH.
Kinvolk’s founding mission assertion is “to construct and promote an enterprise-grade open cloud-native stack”—we predict this matches completely with our rising buyer wants and our ongoing investments in open supply and Kubernetes.
Kinvolk has a wealthy, progressive historical past in open supply cloud-native distributed computing, together with Kubernetes, eBPF, group constructing, and container-optimized Linux, in addition to vital early work with CoreOS (the corporate) on the rkt container runtime. Kinvolk finally went on to create Flatcar Container Linux, a preferred different to CoreOS Container Linux, in addition to the Lokomotive and Inspektor Gadget tasks.
Microsoft is happy to carry the experience of the Kinvolk crew to Azure, the place they are going to be key contributors to the engineering improvement of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Arc, and future tasks that can develop Azure’s hybrid container platform capabilities and improve Microsoft’s upstream open supply contributions within the Kubernetes and container house. Keep tuned for extra technical particulars quickly.
Constructing with open supply communities
As well as, Microsoft respects and needs to study from the Kinvolk crew’s nice monitor report in beginning, constructing, and nurturing open supply group tasks, and Microsoft is dedicated to sustaining and constructing upon Kinvolk’s open supply tradition. The Kinvolk crew will stay energetic of their current open supply tasks and can be important to driving additional collaboration between Azure engineering groups and the bigger open supply container group.
Flatcar Container Linux has a sizeable group of customers on Azure, in addition to different clouds, and on-premises. We all know the CoreOS group has been on a winding journey over time—we need to guarantee the Flatcar group that Microsoft and the Kinvolk crew will proceed to collaborate with the bigger Flatcar group on the evolution of Flatcar Container Linux. Microsoft is dedicated to Flatcar Container Linux group improvement and can put money into working with the Flatcar group to create a development path ahead collectively. We’ll have our first assembly with the group throughout the coming weeks and invite anybody to attend and be a part of the dialog.
We’re excited to carry the Kinvolk crew and their applied sciences to Microsoft and stay up for the contributions they carry to Azure, our clients, and the open supply group.