Microsoft acquires Berlin open source company Kinvolk to accelerate container technology innovation

SegmentFault Thoughts or Not News On April 29th, US time, Microsoft announced that it had acquired the open source company Kinvolk GmbH. Kinvolk CEO Chris Kühl also announced the news on Kinvolk's official blog.

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The following is the full text translation of Microsoft official information: Microsoft acquires Kinvolk to accelerate container-optimized innovation

Whether in the cloud or in the enterprise, the ability to run Kubernetes anywhere has always been the top priority for Azure customers who want to innovate quickly. Customers are paying more and more attention to container-optimized workloads and operating systems, modernization of lean applications, and easier Benefits of operation and platform flexibility.

To support this rapid development, we announced that Microsoft has acquired Kinvolk GmbH.

Kinvolk's founding mission is to "build and promote an enterprise-level open cloud native stack"-we think this is in full compliance with our growing customer demand and our continued investment in open source and Kubernetes.

Kinvolk has a rich history of innovation in open source cloud-native distributed computing, including Kubernetes, eBPF, community building and container-optimized Linux, and important early work with CoreOS (the company) on the 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 pleased to bring the expertise of the Kinvolk team to Azure. They will become the main contributors to the engineering development of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Arc, and future projects. These projects will expand Azure’s hybrid container platform capabilities and increase Microsoft’s Contributions to upstream open source in the field of Kubernetes and containers. Please continue to pay attention to more technical details.

and the open source community to build

In addition, Microsoft respects and hopes to learn from the Kinvolk team's good record in launching, building and cultivating open source community projects. 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, which is essential to promote further cooperation between the Azure engineering team and the larger open source container community.

Flatcar Container Linux has a large user community in Azure and other clouds and within the enterprise. We know that the CoreOS community has been on a tortuous journey for many 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 development of the Flatcar Container Linux community and will invest in cooperation with the Flatcar community to jointly create a path of growth. We will hold the first meeting with the community in the coming weeks and invite anyone interested to attend and join the conversation.

We are very happy 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.

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The following is the full translation of Kinvolk official information: Microsoft acquires Kinvolk

Today, we are happy to announce that Kinvolk has been acquired by Microsoft.

As early as 2015, we set out to create a company focused on building and improving open source Linux technology in the cloud-native field. Our main goal is to have a significant positive impact on the open source community in which we participate, and to work hard on projects and technologies so that we can focus on cooperation rather than competition. We joined Microsoft to advance these goals in ways that we cannot accomplish alone.

The name "Kinvolk" (from "kinfolk", meaning big family, with German characteristics) was chosen to highlight the importance of the community to us in the broadest sense: employees, customers, partners, partners, and all participating Kinvolk support Supporters of activities such as Cloud Native Rejekts or All Systems Go!.

Our earliest projects developed for customers such as CoreOS and WeaveWorks established our reputation as experts in Linux and cloud native technology. When CoreOS was acquired by Red Hat, we saw an opportunity to help the community and used our own Flatcar Container Linux distribution. To fill the gap, Lokomotive and Inspektor Gadget were soon launched, which is our eBPF-based tool suite for debugging and inspecting Kubernetes clusters.

In this process, according to our values ("cooperation>competition", "community>product", "contribution>consumption", and "welcome>exclusion"), we have established close relationships with many people in the cloud native community . In particular, we have established a very close cooperative relationship with Microsoft, which can be traced back to our cooperation on the service mesh interface, and then brought Flatcar container Linux to Azure, and supported the migration of Azure’s major customers from CoreOS to Flatcar, and recently Support for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is realized through Lokomotive and Inspektor Gadget.

We look forward to focusing on our open source work, realizing the full potential of eBPF in Kubernetes through tools such as Inspektor Gadget, and working in Kubernetes, systemd, and many other communities that we actively participate in. We are also eager to work with Microsoft's product team to help bring these leading open source capabilities to a larger customer base through Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Arc, and many other services and products. However, our main task will still be our open source projects and make these projects available on all platforms.

Undoubtedly, there will be many problems, especially in the Flatcar Container Linux user community. Microsoft has made it clear that we want to ensure continuity for users who have experienced a lot of turmoil in the past few years. This will not be a reenactment of a movie you have seen before. In fact, we and Microsoft are committed to double the development of the Flatcar community: we hope to expand the range of partners, contributors and users to ensure that Flatcar, as a truly open, community-driven project, has a vibrant, successful and sustainable Long-term future. As the first step towards this future, we welcome you to participate in our new monthly community meeting.

When you do the right open source, you will not do it alone, you will do it in cooperation with the open source community. As part of Microsoft, we intend to continue this practice.

We look forward to continuing to work closely with you, even as the Kinvolk team enters the next phase of our journey.

The same team, different companies, volks. ❤️