Ross Patton/WIRED
The next big thing in cloud computing doesn’t work with Microsoft’s Windows operating system. But Microsoft wants to change that.
As part of its ongoing effort to embrace the latest tech trends, Microsoft says it’s building a version of Windows that will offer something akin to Docker—a technology originally created for the Linux operating system that’s all the rage among the companies and engineers developing the massive online services that have come to define the modern tech world.
To build a modern online service—such as a Google, a Facebook, a Twitter, or even the services running inside major financial institutions and other traditional businesses—you’re typically forced to run software across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of computer servers, and Docker provides a way of doing this more easily and more efficiently. It’s kinda like a shipping container for the digital universe, a tool that lets you neatly package software so you can readily move it from machine to machine and run more of it on each one. Google used a similar technology in building its online empire, the largest on the net.
Now, many others are at least kicking the tires on Docker, with the company behind the technology (also called Docker) saying that over 14,000 applications now use it. Google is ensuring the technology runs nicely atop its public cloud computing services, where outside companies and engineers can instantly rent virtual machines for running their own online software. And various other cloud computing outfits, from Amazon and Rackspace to Digital Ocean, are doing much the same thing.
In the eyes of many, Docker represents the future of online software engineering—and that’s a bit of an issue for Microsoft. Docker, you see, is built on the very foundations of Linux, the open source operating system that has already eclipsed Windows among the giants of the web.
For Windows to stay relevant, Microsoft must offer something similar to Docker on its own operating system, and that’s what it’s vowing to do. Microsoft corporate vice president Jason Zander tells WIRED that the company will add “new container technologies” to the next incarnation of the Windows Server operating system, the version used to run large online services inside the world’s data centers.
Straight Outta Microsoft
Docker is based on a Linux technology called cgroups—essentially a means of carefully allotting a portion of a machine’s resources to a particular piece of software—and according to Zander, Microsoft has long run some of its own online services atop a special version of Windows that includes something similar to cgroups. Now, he says, the company is building a commercial version of Windows that includes this technology. “We’ve actually had technology, historically, inside Microsoft, that we have used internally,” he says, “and this is us bringing that to Windows Server.”
Microsoft has published a research paper detailing a cgroups-like technology called “Drawbridge,” but Zander seems to indicate that Microsoft will include a different container technology with Windows Server.
As Zandar explains it, the addition of this technology means you’ll be able to more efficiently run software across a large number of machines, much as you can with Docker on Linux. But, naturally, the containers that run atop Windows will be different from those than run atop Linux. According to Solomon Hykes—the driving force behind the Docker project and the chief technology officer of startup that runs it—this means you won’t have the power to move Docker containers from a Windows machine to a Linux machine, or vice versa.
But containers running atop Windows will use the same interface as those running atop Linux. This means that you’ll be able to use the same central piece of software to manage containers running across both Linux and Windows machines—and that building applications for Windows will be more like building applications for Linux. “There is a whole ecosystem of tools that the Docker community is creating for developing and testing applications,” says Hykes, “and basically, Microsoft is making sure all that can be used on the Windows part of your stack.”
A Pivotal View
For Mark Kropf, who oversees Windows work at a cloud computing company called Pivotal, this could be a step forward for Microsoft. He says that many Pivotal customers are calling for the ability to use containers atop Windows. “Linux containers is a way of more cheaper and easily bring up applications,” he says, “and on Windows, that’s really onerous today.” Several cloud computing efforts have been working to offer tools that could somehow mimic containers on the Windows OS—including Pivotal—but what’s really needed is a version of Windows that offers its own containers.
Kropf points out, however, that Microsoft is well behind the Linux world—and the new version of Windows is still a long ways away. “When it comes to deploying applications on Windows via Docker, that’s probably not going to happen for years,” he says.
Indeed, Microsoft has fallen behind the competition in many ways—most large web services run atop Linux and most cloud services are geared toward Linux—but the company is intent on making up lost ground. It already provides a way of running Linux—and Linux Docker containers—atop its own cloud service, Microsoft Azure, and now, it’s taking another step by adding containers to Windows. This isn’t the sort of thing Microsoft would have done in the past. Traditionally, it was loath to play nicely with the Linux world. But now, the company realizes it must.
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