Microsoft Intros Docker Command Line Interface for Windows

Microsoft launched a command line interface for Docker that runs on Windows. Until now, users could only manage Docker containers using a Linux machine or a virtualized Docker environment on a Windows machine.

Docker is one of the hottest emerging technologies at the intersection of software development and IT infrastructure management, and tech giants are racing to make sure their existing products and services support the open source technology as well as to develop new services around it.

Microsoft announced a partnership with Docker in October, saying it would bring native support for Docker containers to the next version of Windows Server in addition to support of the technology on its Azure cloud. Google added a Docker container management service to its cloud platform earlier this month, and Amazon Web Services did the same last week.

By standardizing the way applications communicate their IT resource requirements, Docker makes it easy to deploy an application on a variety of servers or clouds and to move it from one resource to another. It is both an open source technology and a for-profit San Francisco-based company.

The Docker CLI for Windows is now in the official Docker GitHub repository. “Today, with a Windows CLI you can manage your Docker hosts wherever they are directly from your Windows Clients,” Khalid Mouss, senior program manager for Azure Compute Runtime at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post announcing the news.

Microsoft has also created a Docker image for ASP.NET, its open source server-side Web application framework. ASP.NET is based on .NET, the popular development framework Microsoft open sourced last week.