Oracle made a move in the Docker container space Friday, acquiring tiny startup StackEngine.

Based in Austin, Texas, StackEngine makes management and orchestration tools for deploying containers in production. Tools such as Kubernetes and Mesosphere touch on this area as well, but there's some assembly required before you've got a full production-ready workflow, StackEngine claims.

StackEngine's ready-made orchestration tool, called the Container Application Center, moves to general availability in June.

The deal was barely announced; Oracle put two sentences on its website (three, if you count the "for more information" one). Investor LiveOak Venture Partners issued a brief missive on Friday as well.

Then again, StackEngine isn't exactly a behemoth. When we met the founders in the fall of 2014, StackEngine had five employees and had closed a $1 million seed round. That was followed up in July with a Series A of undisclosed size.

Terms of the Oracle acquisition were not disclosed.

The move to production is the hot issue for Linux containers, particularly Docker containers. Containers have proven themselves in development and test environments as a way for easily launching applications and migrating them to different environments, such as public clouds. To make a bigger business of containers, Docker Inc. and others will have to turn the little beasties into production-ready creatures.

For Oracle, interest in containers goes hand-in-hand with a play for the entire cloud stack. Using its business software franchise as bedrock, Oracle is pitching itself as the logical provider of cloud services and infrastructure. It recently upped its game with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and container support is part of that offering.