Microsoft Acquires Container Platform Deis From Engine Yard (techcrunch.com)

According to an announcement made earlier today, Microsoft has acquired Deis, "the company behind some of the most popular tools for building and managing applications on top of the Google-incubated Kubernetes container orchestration service," writes Frederic Lardinois via TechCrunch. From the report: "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," Microsoft's executive VP for its cloud and enterprise group Scott Guthrie writes today. "To support this vision, we're pleased to announce that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Deis -- a company that has been at the center of the container transformation." Deis provides three core open-source tools for managing Kubernetes deployments: Workflow, a platform for developers and operations teams to easily deploy and manage containerized apps; the Kubernetes package manager Helm; and Steward, a Kubernetes-native service broker (which basically allows applications to talk to each other). Like similar companies, its business model relies on providing paid support and training for these applications. The team will continue to work on these open-source tools, which are currently in use by the likes of Mozilla, CloudMine and SocialRadar.

Comments

Re:What the hell do containers even do?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... if I need a virtual server for something, I spin up a virtual server and I run software on it. But virtualization is enough of a pain in the ass when it doesn't work right. Why would I want containers to add yet another level of abstraction getting in my way.

Because containers are lighter weight than virtual servers but still get what you want done. You still have only one "extra level of abstraction" but it's less of a pain.

A virtual server is a whole virtual machine, with its own copy of the OS, its own file system with all the libraries and utilities, etc.

A container is a package containing your application and designating how much of which version of the OS, libraries, file system, utilities, etc. it gets to see. It looks to the app like it's running on its own little machine, just like in a VM. But it's actually running (along with everything else) under the native Linux kernel, which is using several compartmentalization mechanisms to give the app its own, limited and tuned, view of task numbers, file system, tables, etc.

It's a sandbox, something like a chroot jail, except instead of just compartmentalizing the file system (to show a version that limits the app's view and shows it its own versions of libraries and such) it does the same thing to stuff like the processor, task environment, available devices, etc.