Kinvolk

History

2021: Microsoft bought Kinvolk

At the end of April 2021, Microsoft acquired Kinvolk, the creator and distributor of the Flatcar Container Linux solution. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Flatcar Container Linux is a Linux distribution designed for workloads and containers, which, according to developers, has a high level of security and low maintenance costs. The launch of Flatcar Container Linux took place in 2018.

Microsoft acquired Kinvolk

Microsoft Azure Compute corporate vice president Brendan Burns notes that the Kinvolk team will join Azure and contribute to the development of Azure Kubernetes (AKS), the Azure Arc management platform and "future projects that will expand the capabilities of the Azure hybrid container platform." He added that the Kinvolk team will continue its existing open source projects, including the development of Flatcar Container Linux. Burns also noted that Flatcar Container Linux already has a significant community of users in Azure, as well as in other clouds and locally.

According to ZDNet, Kinvolk previously worked with CoreOS, as well as on the Lokomotive and Inspektor Gadget projects. Lokomotive is a standalone distribution of Kubernetes for cloud platforms that can work as a Kubernetes cluster with a full stack on top of Flatcar Container Linux or another Kubernetes offering. Inspektor Gadget is a set of tools for debugging and validation.

Microsoft is actively working with open source. More than half of Azure workloads are Linux-based. The corporation has its own Linux distribution called CBL-Mariner, which is a lightweight Linux distribution that Microsoft uses for its own Azure services and peripherals.^[1]

Notes