After the takeover of the social network LinkedIn for $24 billion and the acquisition of Nuance for $20 billion, now Microsoft is strengthening its business with the cloud by acquiring the Kinvolk — a 6-year-old Berlin start-up, which is primarily active in the areas of container environments and Kubernetes.
The acquisition should pay off for the Redmond-based company, especially with regard to the expansion of its own Microsoft Azure cloud.
Kinvolk is the company behind Flatcar Container Linux, an alternative to CoreOS Container Linux designed for container workloads. Microsoft assured that the work on Flatcar Container Linux would continue regardless of the takeover, and Kinvolk will contribute to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Arc, “and future projects that further expand Azure’s capabilities as a hybrid container platform. Microsoft’s upstream contributions to open source in the Kubernetes and container areas will also increase as a result.” — Microsoft wrote in a blog post.
In addition, Microsoft is also “committed to cultivating and expanding Kinvolk’s open-source culture.” the announcement said. The Redmond tech giant has embraced open source and Linux in recent years.
