Microsoft bought Deis from platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider Engine Yard, which bought OpDemand in 2015 – the original creator of Deis. Terms of the new deal are yet to be confirmed.

According to Vole, there are shedloads of customers looking to build and deploy containerised workloads on the Azure cloud, and the new acquisition will support them in achieving this.

Writing in his bog, Scott Guthrie, EVP of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group, said that the Deis team were  strong supporters of the open source community – developing tools, contributing code and organising developer meetups.

"We expect Deis’ technology to make it even easier for customers to work with our existing container portfolio including Linux and Windows Server Containers, Hyper-V Containers and Azure Container Service, no matter what tools they choose to use", he added.

Microsoft announced last year that it would be adding the commercial version of the Docker Engine into Windows Server 2016. The tech giant has also released a recent blog with Docker which discusses opportunities for their technologies to jointly support enterprise workloads.

Deis has led many open source projects, including Helm, Workflow and Steward, offering solutions for developers building, deploying, managing and scaling applications on Kubernetes. The projects incorporate container technologies into application platforms combining technologies from Google, Docker and CoreOS. The outfit said it would continue to operate these existing projects from within Microsoft.

In a Deis press release, CTO Gabriel Monroy noted that his company was impressed with Microsoft’s cloud leadership and support for the open source community. He wrote that the move would help to "define, shape and build new cloud-native applications".