A quick news in brief mention here is thrown up by the Microsoft Azure Blog, which has just announced "news" of Docker running on Azure.
Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure offering produced by Microsoft, a software firm based in Washington state.
Consisting of Docker Engine, a portable, lightweight runtime and packaging tool, and Docker Hub, a cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows, Docker enables apps to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments.
Microsoft has already made what it calls a "strategic" partnership (as opposed to a "casual" one perhaps?) with Docker in October 2014. This brought the Windows Server ecosystem to the Docker community, says Microsoft — or, looking at another way: This re-engineered Microsoft’s position to enable developers reliant on the Windows Server ecosystem to get closer to the open platform technologies in Docker.
So now Microsoft has announced Windows code is now merged into Docker, meaning developers can use a Docker client directly from a Windows machine to manage containers running on Linux hosts.
As a bonus, says Khalid Mouss, Sr. Program Manager, Azure Compute Runtime, following Microsoft's announcement of open sourcing .NET core framework and Linux distribution, "We have made available a Docker image for ASP.NET on Docker Hub which you can take advantage of to create ASP.NET ready containers from the base image."
"Until today, you could only use Linux-based client Command Line Interface (CLI) to manage your Docker container deployments or use boot2docker to set up a virtualized development environment in a Windows client machine. Now, with a Windows CLI, you can manage your Docker hosts wherever they are directly from your Windows Clients," said Microsoft.
This, says the firm, further demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to agility, innovation, and openness. Did you doubt it anyway?
