Kinvolk expands Flatcar Container Linux offerings to meet enterprise Kubernetes requirements

New Flatcar Pro and LTS editions deliver long-term support, regulatory compliance, and optimization for cloud platforms, complementing existing widely-adopted community release channels now available in all major cloud marketplaces

News provided by

Kinvolk GmbH

Nov 17, 2020, 09:00 ET


BERLIN, Nov. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Kinvolk, the Kubernetes Linux experts, today announced the availability of expanded deployment options for users adopting Flatcar Container Linux as the foundation for Kubernetes and other Linux container environments. The commercially available Flatcar Container Linux Pro and Long-Term Support (LTS) editions address enterprise demand for security, support, and tight cloud integration, while the company also announced that free edition of Flatcar is now in all three major cloud marketplaces.

With hundreds of millions of usage hours across in the last six months alone, Flatcar has built upon its CoreOS heritage to establish itself as the Kubernetes community's favorite container-optimized Linux distribution. The new commercially-supported Pro and LTS offerings complement free versions of Flatcar in Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform Marketplaces, expanding the options available to users seeking a secure, automatically updating operating system optimized for containers running in the cloud.

"When we launched Flatcar, we had no idea that it would become as popular as it did," said Chris Kühl, chief executive officer at Kinvolk. "We just knew that it was the right model for deploying containers, and it seems that the community agreed. Now, as enterprise users are asking for capabilities beyond the needs of the original open source community, it just made sense to expand our offerings to support those customers as well."

Flatcar Container Linux Pro: Optimized for Cloud

Flatcar Container Linux Pro is a marketplace-delivered, cloud-optimized version of Flatcar, initially available for Microsoft Azure with releases planned for AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

The exact set of features will depend on the target cloud platform. As an example, Flatcar Container Linux Pro for Azure, available today in Azure Marketplace (https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/kinvolk.flatcar_pro), includes the following.

  • An Azure-tuned kernel (initially based on the 5.4 Linux release), with all the configuration options, patches and modules required for optimized performance on Azure, as specified by the Microsoft Azure Linux team.
  • Support for Azure Accelerated Networking, thanks to included single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV).
  • Built-in drivers for all Azure GPU-enabled instances, enabling access to accelerated graphics hardware for workloads such as machine learning.
  • HyperV telemetry, enabling reporting of boot-time and other issues through the hypervisor for ease of troubleshooting and support.
  • Optional Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) encryption modules, to enable organizations to meet regulatory security compliance requirements.

In addition, Flatcar Container Linux Pro comes with commercial support from Kinvolk.

Flatcar Container Linux LTS: Enterprise Stability and Compliance

To meet the needs of customers who prioritize platform security and long-term stability, the new Flatcar Container Linux Long-Term Support (LTS) edition offers a guaranteed minimum 18 month support life-cycle. This compares with a typical two month refresh cadence for the community Stable channel, and even more frequent Alpha and Beta channel updates.

Each Flatcar LTS release will be based on an LTS upstream kernel, and will be kept up-to-date with critical patch fixes including for security vulnerabilities, but will not receive new Flatcar features or major component version updates, ensuring maximum stability for applications while simplifying operations and maintaining security compliance.

In addition to its extended support life-cycle, Flatcar Container Linux LTS includes enhanced functionality from the Pro edition, including support for FIPS encryption.

Flatcar (free version) available in Azure, AWS and GCP Marketplaces

Until now, while Kinvolk has distributed images for all major cloud platforms, users had to manually deploy those images into their accounts. Now, with support for all three major cloud marketplaces, finding and deploying Flatcar Container Linux could not be easier.

Flatcar Container Linux is available in:

And, as always, Flatcar is free.

About Kinvolk

Kinvolk are the Kubernetes Linux experts. Founded in Berlin, Germany in 2015 by a trio of open source technologists, the company established its reputation through ground-breaking projects such as the rkt container engine (developed in collaboration with CoreOS), systemd, and Weave Scope (BPF-based container monitoring). Kinvolk maintains and provides support for a number of open source projects including Flatcar Container Linux (a fork of CoreOS Container Linux) and Lokomotive (a Kubernetes distribution inspired by CoreOS Tectonic). As believers in open community collaboration, Kinvolk sponsors and co-organizes the All Systems Go! and Cloud-Native Rejekts conferences. Customers include major technology vendors, innovative start-ups, and end-users deploying Linux and Kubernetes.

Media Contact

Andrew Randall, Kinvolk GmbH, +49 1701416582, [email protected]

Chris Kuehl, Kinvolk GmbH, +1 619 434 0909, [email protected]

Twitter, Facebook

SOURCE Kinvolk GmbH

Related Links

https://www.kinvolk.io/