Microsoft Announces Support For Docker Containers

Microsoft is lending its considerable presence to the Docker express. The company today announced that future versions of Windows Server will support the application container technology.

The strategic partnership with Docker Inc. means that organizations running Windows Server in mixed and virtualized infrastructures will be able to move containerized applications quickly between Windows Server and other environments, such as VMware, and online infrastructure-as-a-service environments like Amazon Web Services and IBM Softlayer, as well as and OpenStack platforms such as Hewlett-Packard Corp.’s Helion, that support Docker. That means developers will be able to create applications faster without the friction over resources between development, QA and production.

Docker is an open source platform that includes the Docker Engine, a portable runtime and packaging tool and the Docker Hub, a cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows. It has become increasingly popular with developers because it eliminates the need to build each application for a specific platform, making development easier and applications much more portable.

However, Docker does not provide infrastructure services for applications. For that it depends on the underlying environment. The Microsoft announcement means that containerized applications will run on virtually all Microsoft environments in the future, including Hyper-V virtualized environments running on Windows Server. Thus the announcements of Docker support from a growing list of infrastructure and IaaS companies allows the open source container technology to realize its potential of insulating the application layer from the underlying infrastructure, giving users great freedom in where they run their applications.