Microsoft has bought Deis Inc., a company that specialises in container cluster management technology that’s relevant to the software giant’s Azure cloud business.
News of the deal hit the web on Monday by way of an official Microsoft blog post. The blog says that Deis was acquired “to help companies innovate with containers”.
This is important, because over the past few years containers have emerged as a smart way for companies to “build, deploy and move their applications to and from the cloud”, and having that option available affords companies the kind of agility required to remain competitive and relevant.
Containers are seen as the new building blocks of cloud-based applications, and Microsoft says they’ve noticed “explosive growth” in containerised workloads recently.
The amount of money paid for Deis hasn’t been mentioned yet, but you can bet it’s in the millions – if not billions – of US dollars, going on the company’s past acquisitions.
Deis Inc., a San Francisco-based company, says on its website that it is “…an open source company that builds tools to make Kubernetes easier to use.” Kubernetes is an open source technology that can be used to manage multiple containers across a cloud, and any newer, better, easier way of helping companies use Kubernetes for their own purposes is seen as a very good thing indeed.
This acquisition continues Microsoft’s embrace of open-source methodologies, as Deis claims an open-source worldview and thus relies on software available freely online.
And Microsoft’s embrace has been all-encompassing, as today, over a third of all virtual machines in Azure run Linux according to the software giant.
Microsoft, for their part, wants to ensure that Azure remains the best place for containerised workloads to run, making the Deis acquisition a smart strategic move.
