BotKube Acquired by Kubeshop, InfraCloud’s Open Source Journey

We are excited to share that Kubeshop, a Kubernetes-focused accelerator/incubator, has acquired a majority stake in BotKube from InfraCloud Technologies. Kubeshop plans to build on existing functionality and invest in the growing BotKube community of both users and contributors. In this blog post, we will reflect on the journey of BotKube at InfraCloud. You can read more details about the announcement here.

Why?

We laid the foundation for the project and built the initial momentum while gaining validation from users. When we spoke to folks at Kubeshop and the founder’s experience in building and scaling DevTools, we felt a great sense of alignment. Backed by Insight Partners and Veeam Co-founder Ratmir Timashev, Kubeshop will be a great steward to realize the full potential of the project.

Services & Open Source

In the early days of InfraCloud when I would interview folks in the final round of the process - they would ask me - are we a product company or a services company? My answer then and even now is: “We want to solve customer problems with solid software engineering while working with smart people! Products, services etc. are just different ways of achieving the same goal, products being a much more scalable way of doing it.” People look at companies as a binary of services or a product and we think the world is more nuanced than that.

At InfraCloud, we work with quite a few startups doing product engineering services in the infrastructure space. Some of the public work which is indicative of what we do involved open sourcing or contributing to niche projects such as Tinkerbell, Kanister etc.

We also work with quite a few end users of cloud native technologies to create an impact for their software engineering teams. This is usually closed source work, but one instance where we talked about was the ephemeral environments we built at OpenGov.

In addition, we also contribute to and maintain open source projects. Fission - a FaaS platform for Kubernetes and BotKube are two of our fairly mature projects, and you can read the story behind BotKube project in detail here. While we were working on BotKube, we also stumbled on another interesting challenge and built MSBotBuilder-go-sdk. Similarly, Krius was bootstrapped looking at some common problems we saw across multiple customers when setting up a multi cluster monitoring platform.

Community

We could not have built BotKube without the community and all the people who supported us in the journey. We had external contributors, folks talking about it at local meetup groups and users using and giving feedback to us. Prasad - the creator of BotKube ensured users are heard and kept working with the community to do release after release. Prasad’s consistency, efforts and closely working with the community is what has gotten BotKube so far!

Future

BotKube is in hands of folks whom we trust and they understand the OSS ethos as well as we do. If you have any questions on any topic, this FAQ on Slack is a good place to check. If you have any other doubts - don’t hesitate to ask questions on BotKube Slack. We will continue to contribute to BotKube and be part of a new chapter in BotKube’s life!