Microsoft Leaves No Stone Unturned to Gain Ground in Open Source Cloud, Acquires Kinvolk

Microsoft acquired Kinvolk, the Germany-based developer of the open source Flatcar Container Linux OS to bolster its containerization capabilities on cloud and on-premise systems. The move underlines how far the company has come with reference to the grudge its former leaders held against open source software.

After decades of being at loggerheads with the open source community over maintaining dominance over the software industry, Microsoft is continuing to gradually ease its stance. The company last week announced the acquisition of Kinvolk (read Kinfolk), the developer of Flatcar Container Linux, an open source distribution service designed specifically for Linux container workloads.

And before you think you smell something fishy, know this: Microsoft’s position in cloud and mobile computing cannot survive, let alone thrive in a world where it is at odds with open source. The evaporation of the animosity in recent years that Microsoft had for open source has something to do with the events of the two decades of the 21st century. Let’s take a jog down the memory lane.

Microsoft and Open Source

The beef between Microsoft and the open source community goes back to the early years of the now multi-billion dollar company, when it was steered by industry veterans and Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen. As any tech enthusiast would tell you, Microsoft’s foundation is built primarily by licensing software and fiercely protecting intellectual property.

It’s not a surprise that Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer heavily criticized open source in the past with Ballmer even going so far as to describing it as a metastasizing cancer after taking over the helm in 2000. “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches,” saidOpens a new window Ballmer during a commercial aired as an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times in June, 2001.

Ballmer’s 14 years as the Microsoft CEO certainly were profitable with sales tripling to $78 billion, which yielded  more than doubled profit of $9 billion. What the company lost, however, was a chance to stay relevant in the mobile industry. For perspective, ~75% of computersOpens a new window run on Windows globally, while Microsoft’s mobile OS share is at 0.2%Opens a new window .

It’s clear that Microsoft’s did not want to lose out yet another decade (they didn’t, evidently), which is why the company made major leaps in their corporate and tech strategy for the future. Microsoft’s management had the foresight to identify cloud as a clear winner, which is why the then executive vice president of Cloud and Enterprise group Satya Nadella was promoted as the CEO.

Nadella’s prior credits  as the president of Microsoft’s R&D division, and as  someone who led the transformation from client services to cloud infrastructure seem to have helped. He also ushered in the cloud-first reorganization, and led the $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHubOpens a new window , the world’s largest source code hosting platform.

Nadella told CNBC’s Squawk AlleyOpens a new window , “Microsoft has heritage here. We were a developer tools company first and now, of course, we are all in on open source, and that’s what really brings us together with GitHub.” More recently, a similar decision was also made by Amazon, whose outgoing CEO Jeff Bezos appointed the AWS head Andy Jassy as his replacement.

In the years since Nadella took over, Microsoft went on to open source .NET Framework, Visual Studio CodeOpens a new window , PowerShellOpens a new window , the JavaScript engine used in Microsoft Edge,  joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum memberOpens a new window and entered a partnership with Canonical, developer of one of the most famous Linux distributions. The company made a bunch of investments in open source development, released Windows 10 and Windows Server versions built with a Linux KernelOpens a new window , and is now the biggest open source contributorOpens a new window in the world.

“Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally,” admitted Brad SmithOpens a new window , president at Microsoft during a chatOpens a new window hosted by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) last year. “The good news is that, if life is long enough, you can learn… that you need to change.”

See Also: Microsoft Bets Big on Nuance Communications To Realize Its Healthcare Ambitions

What Does Kinvolk Do?

Operating out of Berlin, Germany, founders of KinvolkOpens a new window originally dabbled with rkt (Rocket) container runtime in collaboration with CoreOS. rkt is an application container engine developed to run Linux application containers/modern production cloud-native environments on pods.

Following Red Hat’s acquisition of CoreOS (later discontinued), Kinvolk, which can roughly be interpreted as extended family, now develops and distributes Flatcar Container Linux, a Linux distribution designed to make cloud containers like Kubernetes more platform-resilient. Flatcar Container Linux was developed as a replacement for CoreOS Container Linux.

The company also developed Lokomotive for Kubernetes distribution, as well as Inspektor Gadget, an assembly of tools to debug and inspect Kubernetes applications running on Lokomotive as well as multiple other Kubernetes distributions.

Flatcar Container Linux ensures containers run on both cloud and on-premise environments, an area Microsoft currently lags in. Kinvolk presently maintains the presence of the Linux distribution for containers across all three of the biggest cloud services providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, and has a decent number of users leveraging it.

See Also: AWS Proves Why It Is the Crown Jewel in the Amazon Empire: Crushes Q1 Estimates

Microsoft’s Plans for Kinvolk

Kinvolk’s Flatcar Container Linux should nicely complement Microsoft’s in-house Linux distribution for containers, called CBL-Mariner. It can also serve as a munition in Microsoft’s arsenal to compete with AWS’ Bottlerocket container operating system, and Google’s Container-Optimized OS, both of which are open source by design.

But for the short term, Microsoft intends to augment its Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Arc, and its other container management plans running on a hybrid cloud environment.

So far, it seems like a win-win for both Microsoft and Kinvolk. Microsoft can gain an advantage from Flatcar Container Linux’ ‘immutable’ nature, which is to say that a particular section of the OS is cordoned off from malicious updates. Moreover, it also has fewer components and features a minimalistic design, which means there’s less area to attack. This also eliminates certain complexities associated with container deployments.

Whereas Kinvolk can continue their work as an entity within the Microsoft ecosystem, often in collaboration with Azure engineering teams. Brendan BurnsOpens a new window , corporate vice president, Azure Compute, wrote in a blog postOpens a new window , “The Kinvolk team will remain active in their existing open source projects and will be essential to driving further collaboration between Azure engineering teams and the larger open source container community.”

Very exited for our team and looking forward to the future as a part of the Microsoft Azure team!

— Chris Kühl (@blixtra) April 29, 2021Opens a new window

Kinvolk has not been fundedOpens a new window so far and terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed as of now.

Winding Up

Remnants of Gates’ (and Ballmer’s) legacy still remain at Microsoft in the form of the most used (not to mention, most pirated) operating system (OS) in the world, Microsoft Windows, among other things. The company’s pivot approximately six years ago was essential in Microsoft’s ascent to staying relevant in an industry that witnesses paradigm shifts every other year.

But more than the optics of what the acquisition of Kinvolk looks like, the technological expertise pertaining to open source OS for Kubernetes containers acquired via the folks at the company, can impart serious teeth to Microsoft, currently engaged in dethroning AWS as the biggest cloud vendor in the world.

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