IBM Corp. is ramping up its efforts to address the rapid adoption of containers, which allow applications to run on multiple operating systems and computers, in the development community.

As part of the push, the company today unveiled a platform called Microservice Builder that combines the disparate tools commonly used for building containerized applications into an integrated bundle. It’s designed to serve as a central hub where enterprise development teams can handle all the different aspects of a software project. This includes first and foremost writing code.

Microservice Builder enables users to set up an installation of the popular Eclipse development platform on their machines that connects with IBM’s backend application tools. It provides integration with Bluemix, the company’s cloud-based middle portfolio, and its WebSphere platform for creating custom server-side environments. Bundling the offerings into Microservice Builder could make them more appealing for companies building containerized applications.

After a team has configured the development environment, they can create a workflow to manage code releases using the Jenkins continuous integration tool. Microservice Builder provides the ability to deploy applications both in corporate data centers and in the cloud, including on platforms that compete with IBM’s Bluemix.

Rounding out the feature set is a series of integrations designed to help companies manage an application once it’s in production. Microservice Builder covers key areas such as security, activity monitoring and container orchestration. The latter feature is powered in large part by Istio, an open-source framework that was released last month to ease streamline the coordination of application components.

IBM, which helped develop the project, is not alone in its efforts to better support containers. Other incumbent players are also embracing the technology in a bid to make their development automation tools more attractive. Among them is Red Hat Inc., which recently acquired a startup called Codenvy Inc. that has developed a container-friendly coding platform.

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