It’s a good day for container management. Today at Microsoft Open Technologies, we are announcing not one, but two open source initiatives to help cloud developers take containers a step further. We have begun work with Google and Docker to bring support for both Kubernetes and libswarm on Microsoft Azure.

MS Open Tech has been hard at work since we announced support for Docker on Azure. The container space moves fast -- and we have a team that also moves fast to support new cloud workloads that can go beyond simple containers. By bringing Kubernetes and libswarm to Azure, we enable describing and composing complex topologies by aggregating Docker containers.

Kubernetes is an open source implementation of container cluster management, a declarative technology supporting orchestration and scheduling of Docker containers. Our work on Kubernetes will enable developers to transparently deploy heterogeneous groups of compute containers on an available pool of Azure Linux virtual machines by using a simple declarative language. In addition, it provides a set of deploy scripts that will automatically set up Azure Linux VM clusters, configure Kubernetes, Docker and all the required dependencies for a Kubernetes cluster.

In addition to contributing to Kubernetes on GitHub, we are starting engineering work to support Docker’s libswarm project. Libswarm is a toolkit and library that aims to define a standard interface to build distributed systems on top of Docker. It abstracts your various host and infrastructure providers in an effort to avoid lock-in to a particular underlying platform. By enabling libswarm on Azure, developers can build against and use libswarm, knowing that it is an interface the Docker community is behind.

These two initiatives are useful for cloud pioneers who are embracing container technologies and want to move beyond very simple deployments, to more complex topologies.

You can also read more about this important openness news on the Azure blog from Microsoft Azure Corporate Vice President Jason Zander. 

By contributing to the Kubernetes open source project and supporting Libswarm, Microsoft Open Technologies continues its investments in container technologies and restates its role in promoting open technologies.