During the last KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen, attendees were re-introduced to Kinvolk, a Berlin-based group of open source contributors, including Chris Kühl, who were early contributors to the rkt container runtime devised at CoreOS and since donated to the CNCF. Now, Kühl and his colleagues have committed to producing and maintaining a fork of CoreOS Container Linux. Called Flatcar Linux, its immediate goal is to maintain its container-agnostic architecture, and maybe later try resuming its own development path.
“With Container Linux, CoreOS created an OS that is pretty close to ideal for cloud-native infrastructure,” stated Kühl in a note to The New Stack. “When the acquisition was announced, there was a lot of confusion about what would happen to it. Thus with Flatcar Linux, we first wanted to ease those concerns by offering a drop-in replacement.
“But Flatcar Linux was likely to happen even before the acquisition was announced,” he continued. “We had been getting requests to support Container Linux and, as we mention in the FAQ, we didn’t see any means of providing commercial support for an OS without controlling the full build pipeline and maintaining it.”
Rebooting the Bootstrap
On April 30, the Kinvolk group officially released Flatcar Linux as a public project, with its own repository. A check of the first draft of its documentation reveals the group is obviously continuing CoreOS’ work in making container configuration files easier for human beings to produce.
Read more at The New Stack
