At Dockercon this week many vendors are singing the praises of their platforms being ideally suited to run application containers. One company with a particularly strong showing at the conference has been Microsoft though, which announced today it is further integrating Docker’s container management products into its Azure cloud portfolio.
Microsoft’s container-related announcements at Dockercon include:
-Docker Datacenter, the container management platform product is now available as a service in the Azure public cloud marketplace. This is a big deal because it allows customers to run Docker Datacenter on their own premises, and in the public cloud. This is not an exclusive agreement however; Docker Datacenter is also available in Amazon Web Service’s cloud.
-Docker Datacenter will be integrated with Azure Stack. Though still in development, Azure Stack is Microsoft’s on-premises private cloud infrastructure offering. Microsoft says Docker Datacenter will be supported in Azure Stack when it becomes available. As part of the support, Microsoft’s Operations Management Suite, which is used to control Azure Stack, will also be able to be used to control Docker Datacenter software.
Microsoft Loves Linux
The practical takeaway here is that Microsoft is embracing the container revolution and enabling developers to use application containers on their cloud platforms. That’s good.
The undercurrent of these announcements is that Microsoft is continuing to embrace open source standards. In addition to developing Windows containers, Microsoft is also supporting the much more popular Linux containers, such as Docker.
It’s a move that would have been much less likely before the reign of Satya Nadella.