Heptio co-founders Joe Beda, CTO, and Craig McLuckie (right). (Heptio Photo)

The trio behind Kubernetes is teaming up again, in a fashion. Microsoft and Heptio plan to announce a new collaboration Thursday at Kubecon designed to verify Heptio’s tools can be used for disaster recovery on Microsoft Azure.

Heptio, co-founded by CEO Craig McLuckie and CTO Joe Beda, and Microsoft Azure, which counts Brendan Burns as a distinguished engineer, will unveil the new partnership during McLuckie’s keynote address Thursday morning deep in the heart of Texas. McLuckie, Beda, and Burns are credited with the development of Kubernetes, which emerged as the de facto standard for container orchestration during 2017, while they all worked at Google earlier this decade.

Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Brendan Burns speaks at CloudNativeCon 2017. (GeekWire Photo / Tom Krazit)

Released as an open-source project in 2015, Kubernetes helps companies that have standardized on containers as the atomic unit of their software development strategy to manage, schedule, and deploy those containers. Heptio is a Seattle-based startup founded in 2016 that’s working on making the notoriously complex Kubernetes project easier to use in the real world, and the new partnership between the two companies focuses on Heptio Ark.

Ark is another open-source project designed as a lifeline when something goes horribly wrong with a Kubernetes cluster. Disaster recovery is a popular cloud service among companies that have decided they need to run workloads on their own infrastructure, but who would also like to hedge that bet.

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