Microsoft announced its acquisition of Kinvolk, a 6-year-old startup out of Berlin that develops open source cloud-based projects. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Kinvolk is the company behind Flatcar Container Linux, an alternative to CoreOS Container Linux designed for container workloads. Kinvolk will contribute to 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 the Kubernetes and container space,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post.
Microsoft said it is “committed to maintaining and building upon Kinvolk’s open source culture,” which includes continuing community development of Flatcar Container Linux. The Redmond, Wash. tech giant has been embracing open source and Linux over the past several years.
