Microsoft buys Kinvolk into Azure team
On April 29, 2021, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Kinvolk, a company focused on building and improving open source Linux and cloud native technologies, though the exact amount of the acquisition has not been disclosed.
Translated from: Microsoft official announcementMicrosoft acquires Kinvolk to accelerate container-optimized innovationThe author:Brendan Burns, Vice President of Azure
Customers looking for rapid innovation from Azure have long valued the ability to run Kubernetes in any situation, whether in the cloud or within the enterprise, and are increasingly focused on the benefits of container-optimized workloads and operating systems, lean application modernization, ease of use improvements, and platform flexibility.
To support this rapid growth, we are announcing that Microsoft has acquired Kinvolk LTD.
Kinvolk’s founding mission is to “build and promote enterprise-class open cloud native stacks “– which we see as perfectly aligned with our growing customer needs and our continued investment in open source and Kubernetes.
Kinvolk has extensive experience in innovation in open source cloud native distributed computing, including Kubernetes, eBPF, community building and container-optimized Linux, as well as key early work with CoreOS on RKT container runtime. Kinvolk eventually created Flatcar Container Linux, a popular alternative to CoreOS Container Linux, as well as the Lokomotive and Inspektor Gadget projects.
Microsoft is excited to bring the Kinvolk team’s expertise to Azure, where they will be key contributors to the engineering development of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Arc, and future projects that will expand Azure’s hybrid container platform capabilities, And increase Microsoft’s upstream open source contributions in Kubernetes and containers. Stay tuned for more technical details.
Build with the open source community
In addition, Microsoft respects and wants to learn from the Kinvolk team’s experience in starting, building and nurturing open source community projects, and Microsoft is committed to maintaining and developing Kinvolk’s open source culture. The Kinvolk team will continue to be active in their existing open source projects and will be critical to driving further collaboration between the Azure engineering team and the larger open source container community.
Flatcar Container Linux has a sizeable user community within Azure as well as other clouds and enterprises. We know the CoreOS community has been on a tortuous journey for years — we want to assure the Flatcar community that Microsoft and the Kinvolk team will continue to collaborate with the larger Flatcar community on the development of Flatcar Container Linux. Microsoft is committed to the Flatcar Container Linux community and will invest in working with the Flatcar community to create a growth path together. We will hold the first meeting with the community in the coming weeks and invite anyone who is interested to attend and join the dialogue.
We are excited to bring the Kinvolk team and their technology to Microsoft and look forward to their contributions to Azure, our customers, and the open source community.