Summary: Microsoft agreed to buy San Francisco-based container management company Deis, which also has a presence in Denver, Colorado. Neither the purchase price nor an anticipated closing date were disclosed. The Deis team, believed to be under 50 people, will be joining Microsoft.
About: Deis was founded as OpDemand in 2011 and was acquired by Engine Yard in 2015. Microsoft is acquiring Deis from Engine Yard. Deis builds open source tools – such as Helm, Steward and Workflow – that help developers create, package and manage applications with and on top of the container orchestration platform Kubernetes.
Deal logic: Microsoft wants to continue supporting and enhance the Deis technology so that it can continually improve and make it easier for end users to work with Azure’s container services, which include Linux, Windows Server Containers, Hyper-V Containers and most importantly, Azure Container Service (ACS). The easier it is for developers, needless to say, the more adoption there will be. It is in areas like this where the big clouds are fighting it out to differentiate and drive value.
Context: Microsoft, which recently put Kubernetes into general availability on ACS, says it has seen ‘explosive growth’ in both interest and deployment of containerised workloads on Azure. Focus on the tools and piecing everything together is something it wants to get on top of so that it can begin to build a critical mass of real estate on its cloud. It is clearly one of the emerging battlegrounds.
