As any developer who has been tasked with moving from local desktop to cloud-native development knows, the journey is filled with potholes and sometimes roadblocks. With this in mind, Microsoft and Docker have announced an extended “strategic collaboration” to integrate Docker Desktop more closely with Microsoft Azure and Visual Studio Code. Simply put, the built-in tools and features of Docker Desktop will help developers run Azure containers in the cloud with a few simple commands.
What this means for developers
Companies are increasingly turning to containerization to increase the speed of development to meet the ever-changing demands of their customers. Developers who are building cloud-native apps can now use native Docker commands to run applications in Azure Container Instances. This should streamline the move from desktop to cloud and could save developers days of coding and recoding. While there are many tools developers can use now, they are often complicated and require a tedious duplication of commands and tasks. Docker says the partnership with Microsoft will make “for a seamless experience when building cloud-native applications” while creating a “friction-free developer experience” from local Visual Studio Code and Docker Desktop development to remote deployment in ACI.
Developers want simplicity, agility, and portability, and development teams want code to cloud solutions that won’t slow them down. Extending our strategic relationship with Microsoft will further reduce the complexity of building, sharing, and running cloud-native, microservices-based applications for developers. — Docker chief executive Scott Johnston
Create Azure containers without orchestration
With this new Docker-Microsoft extended partnership, developers can easily create Azure Container Instances without orchestration. According to Docker, tighter integration with Azure will boost developer productivity because of these key features:
- Easy logins directly to Azure from the Docker CLI.
- An ACI cloud container service environment can be set up automatically with defaults and no infrastructure overhead.
- Quickly and easily run applications by switching from a local context to a cloud context.
- Container application development is simplified using the Compose specification, which allows developers to invoke fully Docker compatible commands seamlessly within a cloud container service.
- Developer teams can share their persistent collaborative cloud development environments through Docker Hub, allowing them to do remote pair programming and real-time collaborative troubleshooting.
For more information on using Docker and Docker Desktop with Azure containers, check out this blog post from Docker.
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