Growing Stronger: Introducing Commercial Support for Kairos
Kairos has always been more than just a Linux distro—it's a bold idea: bring the power and flexibility of Kubernetes to the edge, with a truly immutable, secure, and cloud-native operating system anyone can use, contribute to, and trust.
Over the past few years, we've seen Kairos go from idea to implementation, and from experimentation to production. Today, it's running in large-scale, real-world deployments across diverse edge use cases. But more importantly—it's been growing as a community.
Today, we're excited to share a new milestone in that journey:
👉 Kairos now has official commercial support options available from Spectro Cloud.
Before we dive into what that means, let's take a step back and talk about what makes an open-source project reliable—especially when the stakes are high.
What Makes Open Source Reliable?
In our view, there are two key ingredients that help teams adopt open source with confidence:
1. Good Governance
A mature open-source project needs a clear structure, transparency, and community direction. You want to know that decisions aren't made behind closed doors, and that the project will be around for the long term.
We're proud to say that Kairos achieved this last year, when it became a CNCF Sandbox Project. This step formalized our commitment to open governance and alignment with the broader cloud-native ecosystem.
Joining the CNCF means more than just a badge—it puts Kairos on a clear track for growth and maturity, with expectations around documentation, contributor diversity, quality, and more. We're not building in isolation—we're growing with a strong open foundation.
2. Professional Support Options
Even the best community can't always meet the needs of production environments. Some organizations—especially those in regulated industries or enterprise IT—need a guaranteed path to support when something breaks.
Until now, support for Kairos has been best-effort, through GitHub issues, Slack discussions, and community help. That's still available, and it works well for many teams.
But for those who need enterprise-grade support, we now have an answer.
Announcing Commercial Support for Kairos
Kairos now has official enterprise-grade support options, thanks to our support partner: Spectro Cloud. As a major contributor and original creator of the project, Spectro Cloud is in a strong position to help organizations adopt Kairos with confidence.
Their support offerings range from basic ticketing-based assistance to full 24×7 production support, including hotfixes, CVE patching, onboarding, and SLAs. This is ideal for teams who want to standardize on Kairos at scale, and need more than community-based help.
This move does not change the open-source nature of the project—Kairos remains 100% open, with no commercial forks or gated features. It simply expands the ecosystem and offers more choice to adopters.
Why This Matters (Even If You Don't Need Support)
You might be thinking, "I use Kairos just fine without needing a support contract. Why should this matter to me?”
Here's why:
- It strengthens the project. When support partners invest in Kairos, it helps sustain long-term development and community health.
- It builds trust. Organizations that rely on SLAs or need commercial assurances now have a clearer path to adoption.
- It keeps options open. Whether you're using Kairos as a solo developer or deploying across thousands of edge devices, you now have the flexibility to get help when you need it.
Open source isn't just about free (as in beer) software. It's about freedom—of choice, of contribution, and of collaboration.
What's Next?
This milestone is just one step in a broader journey.
We want to continue maturing Kairos and reach CNCF Incubation—a critical next phase in the project's evolution. To do that, we need to keep growing the community, broadening adoption, and building deeper collaboration.
So we're putting out a call:
🔔 If you're a company invested in Kairos, there are two key ways you can help:
-
Contribute Maintainers
If you're already using Kairos in your products or infrastructure, chances are you're making improvements, tooling, or fixes internally. Why not share that value with the broader community? We invite you to become a maintainer, help guide the roadmap, and collaborate with us to shape the future of edge Linux together. -
Become a Support Partner
If you're recommending Kairos to your customers and helping them succeed with it, we'd love to recognize your role. Let's work together to include your organization in our list of Kairos support partners—making it clear that help is available from more than one source, and encouraging adoption from companies that want a trusted hand.
📩 Interested? Reach out to us at members@kairos.io to start the conversation.
Let's continue building Kairos as an open, shared foundation—one that scales with our collective ambition.
Try Kairos — and Get Help When You Need It
If you're exploring Kairos or already using it in production, we're here to support you—both as a community and through professional channels.
Kairos now has official enterprise-grade support partners, for those who need additional help beyond the community. Spectro Cloud, the original creator and a key maintainer of the project, is the first company to offer commercial support for Kairos.
We expect more organizations to join as support providers as adoption continues to grow.
As always, you can get involved with Kairos via GitHub, our Slack community, and other open channels. We welcome contributors, feedback, and discussion.
Thanks to everyone who's helped bring Kairos this far—we're excited to keep improving it with you.
🧡 The Kairos Maintainers