News

Docker Gets More Windows Love

Although not a full-fleged client, a new command-line interface may be a harbinger of things to come.

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 11/18/2014

Microsoft continues its huge efforts at open source integration, this time providing an on-ramp to manage Linux-based Docker containers within Windows. At the same time, Docker continues it meteoric ascent within the virtualization industry -- and within Microsoft.

Microsoft today said it has merged Windows code into Docker, allowing administrators from a Windows client to manage Docker containers running on Linux hosts. It's the latest move by Microsoft to jump on the Docker bandwagon, which began earlier this year to support Linux containers in the Azure pubic cloud to last month's pact by the two companies to develop native Docker clients for Windows Server.

The company published reference documentation, published in the form of a command line interface (CLI), illustrating how to compile a Docker container on Windows. "Up till today you could only use Linux based client CLI to manage your Docker container deployments or use boot2docker to set up a virtualized development environment in a Windows client machine," wrote Khalid Mouss, a senior program manager for the Azure runtime, in a blog post.

"Today, with a Windows CLI you can manage your Docker hosts wherever they are directly from your Windows clients,' Mouss added. The Docker client is in the official Docker GitHub repository. Those interested can follow its development under Pull Request#9113.

While noteworthy, it bares noting this is not the announcement of a Windows Docker client, it's just a move to enable management of Linux clients from a Windows client, said Andrew Brust, research director at Gigaom Research. "This is simply a client that lets you run a client to manage Linux-based Docker containers," Brust said. "It's interesting but it's not a huge deal."

Furthermore, Mouse said on the heels of Microsoft open sourcing the .NET Framework last week, the company today also released a Docker image for ASP.NET on Docker Hub enabling developers to create ASP.NET ready containers from the base image. The ASP.NET image is available from Docker Hub.