Microsoft has announced the acquisition of Deis, a company which provides some of the most premium tools that can be utilized for building and managing container based applications. In particular, Deis provides a slew of tools that are essential for building and managing applications on Google’s Kubernetes container service. The acquisition will significantly ramp up Microsoft’s presence with regards to the Kubernetes container service.
The company purchased Deis from Engine Yard, which had earlier acquired it in 2015. Announcing the acquisition, the company said:
We’re pleased to announce that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Deis – a company that has been at the center of the container transformation. Deis gives developers the means to vastly improve application agility, efficiency and reliability through their Kubernetes container management technologies.
Microsoft of course, has a container orchestration service of its own in form of the formidable Azure. However, this particular acquisition is aimed at boosting the company’s prowess with regards to the Kubernetes service which is increasingly becoming a standard in the industry.
The acquisition will also bring Microsoft a team that is quite keen on open source technology, while also being well versed in the Kubernetes. This latter part is more important than it appears on the surface considering that there is a severe dearth of professionals versed in the container orchestration service.
The open source experience will be important for Microsoft which at its heart is an enterprise subsisting in an environment that is increasingly preferential to open source technologies. Indeed, Deis will continue working on its open source projects which are brought in use by the likes of Mozilla, CloudMine and SocialRadar.
The company expects other benefits from the acquisition as well.
We expect Deis’ technology to make it even easier for customers to work with our existing container portfolio including Linux and Windows Server Containers, Hyper-V Containers and Azure Container Service, no matter what tools they choose to use.
