Microsoft made its first Deis announcement today at CoreOS Fest. The company announced Draft, a new open-source development tool for cloud-native applications that run on Kubernetes. This is the first release since the company acquired the Kubernetes company Deis back in April. 

According to the company, Draft was developed to address the complexity and constraints the development community was facing when it came to working with Kubernetes.

“Application containers have skyrocketed in popularity over the last few years. In recent months, Kubernetes has emerged as a popular solution for orchestrating these containers. While many turn to Kubernetes for its extensible architecture and vibrant open-source community, some still view Kubernetes as too difficult to use,” Gabe Monroy, lead PM for containers on Microsoft Azure, wrote in a blog post.

Draft allows developers to start working on container-based apps without having to install Kubernetes or use Docker, Monroy explained.

“This simple yet flexible user experience for developers is inspired by PaaS systems like Deis and Cloud Foundry which support the concept of buildpacks. However, Draft differs from buildpack-oriented PaaS systems because it writes out build and deployment configuration into the source tree, making it trivial to construct continuous integration (CI) pipelines that can bring these containers all the way to production,” Monroy wrote.

In addition, Microsoft today announced the public preview of Azure Site Recovery. The solution enables businesses to create a disaster recovery strategy for IaaS based apps on Azure. It is offered “as-a-Service,” provides a simplified user experience, features application-aware recovery, and non-disruptive DR drills.

More information is available here.