Microsoft Acquires Cloud Startup As It Races To Catch Up With Rival

In a blog post, Microsoft has announced the acquisition of Deis, a firm that concentrates on containers – a way of developing and deploying software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed in the deal that was revealed on Monday morning.

In cloud computing, software containers are increasingly being viewed as the new way of building applications that are based on the cloud. Companies such as Deis are therefore in high demand as business organizations turn to cloud systems that are managed by third parties.

Kubernetes technology

When there is more than one container that needs to be managed across a cloud, a technology that is backed by Google and which is known as Kubernetes is used. Deis’ biggest selling point is that it makes it easy for organizations to make use of Kubernetes for their own needs.

While announcing the acquisition, Scott Guthrie, an executive vice president at Microsoft said that tremendous growth had been observed in interest as well as in actual deployment of the containers on the company’s cloud platform, Azure.

“At Microsoft, we’ve seen explosive growth in both interest and deployment of containerized workloads on Azure, and we’re committed to ensuring Azure is the best place to run them,” wrote Guthrie.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Deis is understood to be an attempt by the Windows-maker to try and catch up to Amazon’s cloud services. This comes in the wake of a growing trend where business organizations are increasingly abandoning their private data centers and moving into the cloud.

Though Microsoft has for a long time been seen as a proprietary software company, Deis relies heavily on open source software. The Redmond, Washington-based software giant is, however, changing and has been selling its cloud platform as perfectly suited for open-source software. This has borne fruit as close to 33% of all the virtual machines on Azure are running on Linux, easily the most popular open-source computer operating system.

Open-source software

Part of the reason why Microsoft would be keen to promote open-source software is the fact that it will lure developers who are critical as they have the power to make a platform popular or not with customers.

Still on open source software, Microsoft recently begun collaborating with Databricks, a firm involved in the commercialization efforts of Apache Spark, an open-source framework. Previously, Databricks was only running on Amazon Web Services. Additionally, towards the end of last year, Microsoft shocked the developer community when it joined the Linux Foundation.