Deis and Google (as well as others) collaborated on the current v2, building on Google's open source Deployment Manager (which you can see at https://github.com/gabrtv/deployment-manager) - itself derived from Google's Cloud Deployment Manager (https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/)

The good thing about open source is, it doesn't really matter who wrote it.

No matter where you are, Microsoft gives you far better guarantees _and_ technical options to make sure your systems are your own. If you're going to interact with EU folks, Azure is by far the best way to still get modern cloud benefits and obey privacy and data locality laws.

Sadly they've discovered that's only really an enterprise play. Even if it's cheaper, Startups just don't care enough (truth be told, they can't generally source good distributed systems and even in the EU view regulatory compliance like tech debt). Grabbing helm, I think MS is trying to appeal to the smaller market by adopting Google's (very interesting and good) approach of making the core admin layer open source.

Microsoft hasn't shown interest (or has refrained from) making many fully batteries-included-but-now-you-can-never-leave approach Google has (which has mixed results, GAE was a disaster but Firebase seems very good?), so they need something sustainable to market Azure to smaller customers (their current strategy is substantial subsidization).