San Francisco, Dec 11 (IANS): US-based tech company New Relic has acquired Pixie Labs, a machine intelligence (ML) observability solution for developers using Kubernetes, for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition will help New Relic expand in the rapidly growing Kubernetes market.

Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling and management. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

San Francisco-based Pixie Labs' technology significantly simplifies observability for Kubernetes environments. With Pixie, telemetry data runs entirely inside Kubernetes at the edge.

More than 300 engineering teams are using the Pixie beta today at companies ranging from startups to enterprises running internet-scale Kubernetes clusters. 

"As Kubernetes rapidly becomes the default environment for deploying and managing software in the cloud, we're doubling down on our Kubernetes strategy with the acquisition of Pixie Labs," said New Relic CEO and Founder Lew Cirne.

"Our goal is to make Pixie and New Relic One ubiquitous to the millions of developers responsible for building and deploying applications in Kubernetes environments," he said in a statement on Thursday.

Modern developers are adopting Kubernetes as the de facto standard for managing containerised workloads on premises and in the cloud.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation recently reported that 83 per cent of survey respondents use Kubernetes in production, up from 58 per cent in 2018.

According to Zain Asgar, Co-founder/CEO of Pixie Labs, joining forces with New Relic "will enable us to scale the Pixie platform faster and accelerate our ability to deliver on that vision for developers."