Microsoft Acquires Flatcar maker Kinvolk

Today, Microsoft announced that it has formally acquired Kinvolk, the Berlin based creator and distributor of Flatcar Container Linux, an enterprise-grade open cloud native stack.  As ZDNet reports, the amount is so far undisclosed.

Following Microsoft recent acquisitions of ZeniMax Media and Nuance Communications this latest acquisition could help aid Azure efforts with the development of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Arc, future projects on the expansion of Azure’s hybrid container platform capabilities and Microsoft’s increased open source contributions in its open source Kubernetes and container space.

According to the company’s press release today,

We’re excited to bring the Kinvolk team and their technologies to Microsoft and look forward to the contributions they bring to Azure, our customers, and the open source community.

Adding Kinvolk to the company’s portfolio appears to pave the way for Microsoft to expand it’s open source efforts on it’s Azure platform. Kinvolk has already worked with Microsoft on the Service Mesh Interface and helping Microsoft to bring the Flatcar container to Azure, supporting the transition of Azure customers from Core OS to Flatcar and most recently enabling support for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with both Lokomotive and Inspector Gadget instruction set and debugging tools.

Kinvolk was founded in 2015 in Berlin, Germany and launched its Flatcar Container Linux in 2018.

The Kinvolk company blog also mirrored Microsoft’s announcement, as the company is looking forward to working closely with Redmond on it’s open source efforts for Azure customers. Nether Microsoft nor Kinvolk has mentioned transition details of employees and the acquisition amount. Microsoft has promised to provide more technical details.