A month after Microsoft purchased a startup that's improving on a core Google technology, the team is still at it (MSFT, AMZN, GOOG, GOOGL)

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May 31, 2017 4:05 PM

The CTO of Deis, which Microsoft bought in April, explains why his team is still hard at work improving the Google-made Kubernetes.

Microsoft Lead PM of Containers and former Deis CTO Gabe Monroy

In April, Microsoft paid an undisclosed sum for Deis, a startup that builds software on top of Kubernetes — a key cloud computing technology, originated at Google, that's very popular amongst Silicon Valley programmers.

The acquisition itself was noteworthy: Despite its recent steps toward opening up, Microsoft still has a reputation for not playing nicely with technology it didn't build itself. And Deis literally billed itself as "The Kubernetes Company" in its marketing, firmly establishing itself as part of that Google-led open source software movement.

Plus, Deis had actually been bought in 2015 by Engine Yard, a well-known maker of software development tools, before getting sold to Microsoft, meaning that the startup has had two owners in as many years.

Now, a little more than a month later, former Deis CTO Gabe Monroy is leading Microsoft's strategy around "software containers," the bleeding-edge market that Kubernetes has largely conquered. Furthermore, Monroy and his ex-Deis engineering team are launching Draft on Wednesday, a new tool to help programmers use Kubernetes to build their software.

Monroy says that the release of Draft, which has been planned before the acquisition, actually allays some of the fears he and his team had coming into Microsoft: Promises had been made, but the team was "naturally skeptical."

"There was this commitment that we were going to continue to succeed in open source," says Monroy. And Microsoft apparently delivered.

The tale of containers and Kubernetes

At the most basic level, "containers" let a programmer break their software down into a whole mess of little packages, all of which are self-contained (get it?) with all of the files, utilities, and tools it needs to run. Developers love it, because it streamlines the process of taking software between computers, servers, and data centers.

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