Microsoft acquires Deis to boost its Kubernetes chops

The deal will help Microsoft better support the Google-originated orchestration system.

Microsoft is acquiring Deis, a company that makes tools to work with the Kubernetes open-source container orchestration system. The deal, announced Monday, marks Microsoft’s continued interest in container orchestration.

Deis creates tools that aim to simplify the development of modern, containerized applications. Containers allow developers to write an application for an isolated, portable runtime that is supposed to be easily transferrable from a workstation to a server environment.

Tools like Deis’s Workflow, Helm, and Steward are supposed to ease the complex process of managing multi-container applications. They build on top of Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration system that Google released to the world in 2014. Deis plans to continue its contributions to those tools as part of Microsoft, company CTO Gabe Monroy said in a blog post.

Microsoft has invested a great deal already in technology that lets developers create applications that run in Windows and Linux containers. The company expects Deis’ technology to help with the use of those existing tools, according to a blog post by Scott Guthrie, the executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise division.

Deis’ Kubernetes expertise will be a key benefit for Microsoft, which has been investing in the popular open-source container orchestration system.

Microsoft acquired the company from Engine Yard, a platform-as-a-service provider that previously purchased Deis in 2015. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal.

The news comes roughly a couple months after Microsoft announced the general availability of Kubernetes in Azure Container Service, its platform-as-a-service offering for containerized applications. Last week, the company also announced the general availability of Azure Container Registry, a service that lets customers store and manage different container images in the cloud.