Docker Strengthens Ties with Azure Cloud, VS Code -- Visual Studio Magazine

Docker Strengthens Ties with Azure Cloud, VS Code

By David Ramel
05/27/2020

Container kingpin Docker announced extended collaboration with Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform and Microsoft's open source, cross-platform Visual Studio Code editor.

The company said the collaboration enables developers to use native Docker commands to run applications in Azure Container Instances for a seamless experience when building cloud-native applications. Azure Container Instances help developers: run containers on the Azure cloud without the need to manage servers; provide containers-on-demand; and secure applications with hypervisor isolation. They can be used to build: elastic bursting with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS); event-driven applications with Azure Logic Apps; and data processing jobs.

Meanwhile, a Docker Desktop and VS Code offering (in beta) helps developers containerize applications on local machines. It comes in "edge" and "stable" downloads for Windows and macOS that helps developers build Kubernetes-ready applications on the desktop and containerize and share applications across any combination of clouds, languages and frameworks. Helping to do that are application templates and an app designer. Specifically the beta solution includes:

Docker App: a way to define, package, execute, and manage distributed applications and coupled services as a single, immutable object.
Docker Developer Tools: Used to securely build, test, and share cloud-ready modern applications from the desktop.
Kubernetes: The leading container orchestration solution.
The ability to use certified images and templates and a variety of languages and tools.

With the goal of simplifying code to cloud application development for developers and development teams, Docker said the deeper collaboration "will allow developers to quickly start new language-specific projects (Node.js, Python, .NET Core/C#), leverage new functionality around the Compose Specification (a developer-focused spec for defining cloud and platform agnostic container-based applications) 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."

The Docker/Microsoft collaboration aims to simplify the often complicated landscape of container development, in which developers face a wide range of complex tooling and duplicative commands and tasks used to go from local machines to cloud-native development. "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," a May 27 news release states.

Specific productivity benefits are said to help 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 can sign up for the Docker Desktop and VS Code beta here.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.