With the success of Flatcar Container Linux on Microsoft Azure Marketplace, we’ve seen hundreds of millions of usage hours since it was made available just a few months ago. Today, we are announcing Kinvolk’s new offering called Flatcar Container Linux Pro for Azure.
Available in the Azure Marketplace , the Pro edition of Flatcar Container Linux is the result of a close collaboration with our friends in the Azure compute team, and includes:
- Direct access to the Flatcar engineering team, with 24x7 access to the Kinvolk customer portal and our SLA-backed support for rapid response to any production issues, or just technical questions.
- 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).
“In collaboration with Kinvolk, we’re continuing to help our customers run optimized Linux experiences on Azure,” said Arpan Shah, General Manager, Microsoft Azure. “With the new Flatcar Container Linux, based on the Azure Tuned Kernel specification, we’re helping customers smoothly transition from CoreOS to Flatcar with enterprise support.”
Flatcar Container Linux Pro will continue to be enhanced with tighter Azure integration, including the following features planned in the coming months:
- 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 setting to enable federal information processing standards (FIPS) encryption modules, that may be required for compliance in some environments.
Beyond this initial release for Azure, we plan to also release Flatcar Container Linux Pro optimized for a variety of cloud platforms. If you are interested in support for a specific platform, please let us know .
Flatcar Container Linux Pro is available today in all Azure global regions, and is billed through your existing Azure account on a metered basis. Pricing is based on instance type. Try it today on Azure Marketplace .
