{"id":96496,"date":"2024-10-29T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-29T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2025-01-16T08:06:24","modified_gmt":"2025-01-16T16:06:24","slug":"flatcar-accepted-into-cncf-at-incubating-level","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opensource.microsoft.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/29\/flatcar-accepted-into-cncf-at-incubating-level\/","title":{"rendered":"Flatcar accepted into CNCF at incubating level"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cA secure community-owned cloud native operating system was one of the missing layers of the CNCF technology stack. As validated by a thorough due diligence process, Flatcar has more than proven itself in this role, and we are thrilled to adopt it as an incubating project and will support growing its community.\u201d<\/em>\u2014Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, Cloud Native Computing Foundation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I couldn\u2019t be more delighted with the news that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee has voted to accept the Flatcar<\/a> project at the incubating level. This is the first time the CNCF has adopted an operating system distribution, marking a significant milestone for both the Flatcar project and the cloud native community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flatcar provides a lightweight Linux OS specifically tailored for hosting container workloads. It was originally derived from CoreOS Container Linux by Kinvolk, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2021<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time of the acquisition, I said \u201cMicrosoft is committed to Flatcar Container Linux community development and will invest in working with the Flatcar community to create a growth path forward together1<\/sup>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am pleased to be able to say that Microsoft stood by its word. Now part of the Azure Core Linux organization, the original Kinvolk team has continued active project development and maintenance with an excellent track record for proactively addressing emerging security vulnerabilities, moved the paid pro features to the free community versions, adopted CNCF best practices for project governance, successfully completed an in-depth independent security review, and established open forums including a popular monthly office hours.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Linux on Azure<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t
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Build, deploy, and run applications on the Linux distribution of your choice<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tTry today<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The community has responded by embracing Flatcar in record numbers. Flatcar is widely deployed across practically every public cloud environment, as well as large on-premises environments, is integrated with many Kubernetes offerings, and underpins several managed Kubernetes services. In Azure, Flatcar is one of the top five most popular Linux distributions, as measured by core (virtual CPU) usage. The result today is a thriving, diverse community of production users, supporters, contributors, and maintainers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All this progress is reflected by acceptance at the incubating level, which in CNCF terms means that a project is considered stable and is used successfully in production environments. This situates Flatcar alongside many other notable incubating cloud native projects such as Dapr, gRPC, Notary, and OpenTelemetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the key characteristics that have enabled Flatcar\u2019s success include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n