Microsoft said Monday that it plans to acquire Kubernetes specialist Deis to beef up Azure cloud support for containers.

"Container technologies let organizations more easily build, deploy, and move applications to and from the cloud," Scott Guthrie, Microsoft executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group, says in a blog post announcing the deal. Microsoft has seen increased growth in containers and wants to improve Azure as a container platform, Guthrie says. (See Microsoft's Looking Cloudy, & That Ain't Bad.)

In addition to container expertise, Deis has "a depth of open source technology experience," Guthrie says.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Deis will continue contributions to Workflow, Helm and Steward open source projects, and will continue its "deep engagement with the Kubernetes community," according to a post on the Deis blog.

Kubernetes is a double-edged sword for a cloud platform provider like Microsoft. On the one hand, it providers greater flexibility and manageability for applications running on clouds, which is great for the platform provider and enterprise customer too.

On the other hand, Kubernetes makes applications more portable, which makes it easier for enterprises to move applications between platforms -- away from Microsoft. (See Hybrid Cloud Will Be a Battlefield & Other Cloud Predictions.)

Figure 1:

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However, with Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) dominating the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market, anything that makes applications more portable works to Microsoft's (and other contenders') advantage, as applications moving between platforms would likely be moving from Amazon to somebody else. (See AWS Tops in Public Cloud, but Azure Is Catching Up.)

Indeed, Kubernetes was developed by Google, which is a relative latecomer to the enterprise cloud market and is working hard to become a major player. (See Google Takes Fight to Amazon, Microsoft & Cisco and Google Cloud Targets Microsoft Users.)

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— Mitch Wagner Editor, Enterprise Cloud News

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