New York, Apr 11 (IANS): Software giant Microsoft has bought startup Deis that specialises in containers -- a modern way to develop and deploy software.

The deal is seen as a boost to Microsoft's cloud because software containers are termed as the new building blocks of cloud-based applications.

According to a report in Fortune on Monday, the containers constitute a hot category as many businesses are turning to third-party public clouds -- like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services -- to run their applications.

"Deis gives developers the means to vastly improve application agility, efficiency and reliability through their Kubernetes container management technologies," said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President Microsoft in a blog post.

According to Microsoft, the company has seen explosive growth in both interest and deployment of containerised workloads on Azure.

The company expected that the Deis' technology simplified it for customers to work with Microsoft's existing container portfolio including Linux and Windows Server Containers and Azure Container Service.