Engineering blog of Kinvolk, a Berlin Linux company behind Flatcar Linux, covering Kubernetes, eBPF, containers and benchmarks.
HN commenters link it for the Flatcar Linux story as the continuation of CoreOS and for the 2021 Microsoft acquisition and its effects.
Kinvolk (https://kinvolk.io), the Kubernetes Linux experts | Berlin, Bengaluru ONSITE or REMOTE | Full Time
Kinvolk is a company focused on services and products for open-source cloud native Linux technologies. While having started out 4+ years ago as a consulting company (we built rkt with CoreOS, for example), we've recently added products to the mix. The first of which is Flatcar Container Linux, our drop-in replacement for CoreOS Container Linux. Building on this, we've introduced Lokomotive, our Kubernetes distribution, a major focus of development for us atm. In addition, we're building a collection of tools for debugging and security based on BPF and other low-level Linux technologies which will be integrated with our Linux + Kubernetes stack.
Kinvolk only works on/with open source technologies and all our products will be fully open source, NOT open core.
We're also the folks behind Cloud Native Rejects (https://cloud-native.rejekts.io/) and All Systems Go! (https://all-systems-go.io/)
If you're interested in working with an expert team that fully understands the the system, is passionate about open source, and building cutting edge technologies then by all means, apply within!
We have a number of openings in BERLIN, BEGELURU and remote:
* Technical Account Manager
* Visual and Brand Designer
* Events coordinator
* Kubernetes Operations Engineer (especially interested in this role being distributed to have follow-the-sun support)
* Cloud Infrastructure…
Layers are integral in Docker, layers were pushed as enabling reuse, composibility, 'immutability', every 'run' statement is a layer. They are not an implementation detail. Managing all these layers adds complexity and impact users from choosing storage drivers, to using layers to building images, and if you are going to use layers you need to be a privileged user to mount all these layers. [1]
Here is an example. I build an Nginx container with no layers from a base alpine image. Users can download and run it in a layer so the original Nginx container remains untouched or run a copy of it. If there is a security alert or update I rerun the build. No layers used. You build the same Nginx container will multiple layers, and have all the overhead of tracking and managing these layers. And users then download the Nginx container made up of all these layers and run it. If there is a security update in any lower layers it needs to rebuild. You have used a workflow and designed an entire system based on stacking layers to compose and build your image. That is a lot of overhead and complexity in basic image management. What is the benefit?
[1] https://kinvolk.io/blog/2018/04/towards-unprivileged-container-builds/
Red Hat is backing CRI-O for an alternative OCI runtime.
While we did pave the way for creating alternatives for Docker in Kubernetes, CoreOS never quite got rkt to 100% stability in Kubernetes. Personally, I love a lot of things about rkt, but the project's ultimate goal was to have standards, regardless of whether or not it was AppC.
If you're still interested in rkt (it's great tech that we still use to this day to run kubelet for all Tectonic clusters), I recommended chatting to the awesome folks at Kinvolk[0]. They maintain rkt alongside CoreOS and support customers using it in production.
[0]: https://kinvolk.io
> That is, a minimal base system that's built for immutable container images, providing just what's needed to bootstrap the current generation of language-specific build and package systems.
At least for the first half, that sounds sort of like Fedora/Red Hat CoreOS[0], the predecessor CoreOS fork Flatcar Container Linux[1], or the Amazon distribution BottleRocket[2].
[0] https://getfedora.org/en/coreos?stream=stable
[1] https://kinvolk.io/flatcar-container-linux/
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/bottlerocket-open-source-os-for-container-hosting/
The most significant change this acquisition brought to Flatcar was to turn it from a vendor-driven open source project to a community-driven one. Also see Kinvolk's statement at the time: https://kinvolk.io/blog/2021/04/microsoft-acquires-kinvolk/
Since then, the project has opened up and has become fully community driven - releases, features, stewardship, everything. To further underline independent stewardship, Flatcar was recently proposed to join the CNCF as an incubating project: https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/991 .
That report resulted in an update to Istio docs: “Warning not to use demo profile for performance evaluation”
https://github.com/istio/istio.io/pull/4220
More here, which basically suggests, don’t stop Istio from scaling out before 500 rps, it doesn’t like that at all:
https://kinvolk.io/blog/2019/05/performance-benchmark-analysis-of-istio-and-linkerd/