Microsoft Releases CLI To Manage Docker Containers from Windows Clients
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 with its support for Linux containers in the Azure pubic cloud, and continued with 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), that illustrates how to compile a Docker container on Windows. "Up 'til 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 bears 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, who, when I saw the news on my phone, happened to be sitting next to me at our Live! 360 conference, taking place this week in Orlando, Fla. "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, Mouss said on the heels of Microsoft open sourcing .NET Framework last week, the company this week 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.
See this month's Redmond magazine cover story on Microsoft's move toward containers as potentially the next wave on infrastructure and application virtualization.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/18/2014 at 11:52 AM