Microsoft Corp. hopes to one-up Amazon Web Services Inc. on a key competitive front in the cloud computing wars.

The technology giant today launched two open-source projects geared toward companies that use Kubernetes, the popular software framework Google LLC released in 2014. It’s the go-to tool for orchestrating software containers, which are increasingly used in the enterprise to build and deploy applications that can then run in any computer environment. This rapid adoption has made the technology a key focus for cloud providers.

Microsoft’s latest open-source contributions reaffirm the trend. Virtual Kubelet, the first, is an evolution of an experimental tool that the company released alongside its “serverless” Azure Container Instances offering in July. The project lets companies quickly add infrastructure resources to a Kubernetes-powered environment when there’s a big increase in demand.

Virtual Kubelet takes advantage of the fact that Azure Container Instances can be used to create containers without most of the hands-on administrative work usually required for the task. Coupled with the fact it’s billed by the second, this makes the offering well-suited for handling short-term usage fluctuations.

What sets Virtual Kubelet apart from its July forerunner is support for competing products. Microsoft said the project has been adopted by HyperHQ Inc., a startup that does business as Hyper.sh and offers a similar serverless container service. The tool could potentially even be made to work with the rival Fargate platform that AWS introduced last week.

The other new project that Microsoft released today, in turn, focuses specifically on its own public cloud. Open Service Broker for Azure enables developers to access key services such as the managed Cosmos DB database directly via the Kubernetes programming interface. The capability should make it considerably easier to draw upon Microsoft services in container projects.

AWS has likewise been working to provide stronger Kubernetes support for customers. In conjunction with the introduction of Fargate last week, the company unveiled a managed service based on the Google-created framework that aims to reduce maintenance overhead. 

Yet while it’s certainly important, Kubernetes is only one part of the container picture. That’s why Microsoft today open-sourced a third, more specialized technology called Kashti. It allows development teams to visualize work done using Brigade, yet another homegrown project that makes it possible to create workflows for automating the management of container clusters.

Image: Microsoft