DEVOPSdigest

Docker has extended its strategic collaboration with Microsoft to simplify code to cloud application development for developers and development teams by more closely integrating with Azure Container Instances (ACI).

The deeper collaboration, which also includes tighter integration with Visual Studio Code (VS Code), will allow developers to quickly start new language-specific projects (Node.js, Python, .NET Core/C#), leverage new functionality around the Compose Specification and streamline how they switch from local development to a serverless cloud container service while remaining in the Docker CLI user interface or from within VS Code.

For developers today, there is a vast array of complex tooling and a duplicative set of commands and tasks to go from local desktop to cloud-native development even when leveraging Docker container technology. The result can often be hours and possibly days for development teams to decide on the right cloud environment to meet their requirements and to have that environment successfully set up. And even when those challenges might be overcome, ensuring that there is a consistent local to cloud environment for highly iterative collaboration is not easily achieved.

Together, Docker and Microsoft aim to solve these problems with an easy, friction-free developer experience from local VS Code and Docker Desktop development to remote deployment in ACI. Tighter integration between Docker and Microsoft developer technologies provides the following productivity benefits to developers:

- Easily log into Azure directly from the Docker CLI

- Trigger an ACI cloud container service environment to be set up automatically with easy to use defaults and no infrastructure overhead

- Switch from a local context to a cloud context to quickly and easily run applications

- Simplifies single container and multi-container application development via the Compose specification allowing a developer to invoke fully Docker compatible commands seamlessly for the first time natively within a cloud container service

- Provides developer teams the ability to share their work through Docker Hub by sharing their persistent collaborative cloud development environments where they can do remote pair programming and real-time collaborative troubleshooting

“Developers want simplicity, agility and portability, and development teams want code to cloud solutions that won’t slow them down,” said Scott Johnston, CEO, Docker. “Extending our strategic relationship with Microsoft will further reduce the complexity of building, sharing and running cloud-native, microservices-based applications for developers. Docker and VS Code are two of the most beloved developer tools and we are proud to bring them together to deliver a better experience for developers building container-based apps for Azure Container Instances.”

“We are excited to expand our work with Docker to accelerate developer productivity by enabling them to use native Docker commands to run applications in Azure Container Instances,” said Amanda Silver, corporate vice president of Product for Developer Tools at Microsoft. “This new seamless experience from desktop to cloud means developers can more quickly and easily collaborate and create applications to run in Azure.”

Docker customers can expect to see the integration with Azure generally available in the second half of 2020.