Six months after revealing plans to bring containers to Windows, Microsoft Corp. is making good on the promise with a homegrown implementation of the lightweight virtualization format that offers a convenient new deployment option for enterprise applications. But the impact of the technology extends far beyond simplifying operations to its entire cloud strategy.

Under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has been working to consolidate its efforts across on- and off-premise environments into a unified vision that the addition of containers could help finally pull together. The resulting whole is set to exceed the sum of its parts on both sides of the cloud equation.

Where the new capability will make the most immediate difference is in the data center, on Microsoft’s rivalry with VMware Inc., which just so happened to introduce its own proprietary version of the technology earlier this year. Building the same feature directly into Windows Server not only checks that move but also, perhaps for the first time, tilts the playing field in Microsoft’s favor.

Applications developed to use the native functionality will have the ability to run inside the containers that the company is adding to its hypervisor without any modification, which addresses both lightweight bare-metal workloads like cloud services and traditional virtual applications. VMware, for lack of its own widely-used operating system, only supports the latter.

Another major asset that Microsoft is exploiting in the fight against the virtualization giant is its Azure public cloud, which is one of the industry’s top three infrastructure-as-a-service platforms. VMware’s VCloud Air alternative doesn’t have nearly as much market presence, and the addition of containers makes Microsoft’s offering that much more appealing for hybrid use cases that rely on the portability of containers to combine on- and off-premise resources.

It also provides Microsoft with an edge over rivals Amazon and Google, which lack a strong corporate presence. That effectively makes Microsoft the only one of the three major players with a comprehensive hybrid value proposition.

Yet with Linux standing firmly as the dominant operating system in the cloud and a majority of virtual workloads running under VMware’s hypervisor, organizations are not about to suddenly abandon their existing investments in favor of an all-Microsoft environment. That’s why Microsoft is integrating Docker with its orchestration tools originally announced a few months ago. That will allow users to manage Windows Server and Hyper-V containers through the same interface as their Linux instances, even if the latter happen to run on a competing infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

With its broad and now tightly coupled set of cloud capabilities, Microsoft is well-positioned to address the emergence of container-powered hybrid applications in the enterprise. The question is whether it can maintain the momentum that has carried the company this far while rivals such as VMware ramp up their own competitive efforts.

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