In November 2018, VMware announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Heptio, a leader in the open Kubernetes ecosystem providing products and expertise that helps organizations deploy and operationalize Kubernetes.

Founded in 2016 by Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, two of the creators of Kubernetes, Heptio has applied its unique insight to a growing set of products, open source projects and contributions to upstream Kubernetes. Heptio opens new channels for VMware to further engage the open source community and harden upstream Kubernetes as well as support the cloud native needs of the largest enterprises in the world.