Microsoft Corp. has introduced extended native support for Kubernetes on its Azure cloud container service, along with upgrades support for the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System.

The Redmond-based company announced the container initiatives at this week’s KubeCon event in Seattle, saying the preview release means that the Azure cloud now supports Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS and Docker Swarm as container orchestration options.

In a blog post, Microsoft’s Corey Sanders, director of compute for Microsoft Azure, said the update means Azure becomes the first public cloud provider to support the three leading container orchestration tools. He explained that Microsoft had previously announced support for Kubernetes on Azure infrastructure back in July 2014, specifically providing support for native Azure networking, load-balancer and Azure disk integration.

“We are taking this support even further and announcing the preview release of Kubernetes 1.4 on Azure Container Service. This deeper and native support of Kubernetes will provide you another fully open source choice for your container orchestration engine on Azure,” Sanders wrote.

In a second blog post, Brendan Burns, partner architect at Microsoft, who previously led development of Kubernetes while at Google, said that the introduction of Kubernetes as a supported orchestration tool on Azure means that functional clusters can be spun up quickly via the Azure portal or using a Python-based command line tool. The Kubernetes cluster is then integrated with other Azure cloud resources.

The announcement comes at a time when most analysts agree that enterprises are beginning to show a serious interest in the potential of containers to revolutionize their IT infrastructure, something that Sanders himself also alluded to.

“We are seeing organizations of every size move their container-based solutions from dev/test environments to production in the cloud,” Sanders added.

With regard to Mesosphere’s DC/OS, Microsoft said the upgraded support includes virtual networking capabilities, job-scheduling and container orchestration based on Marathon, which is the container orchestration platform that underpins Apache Mesos. The upgrade also includes faster installation of platforms like the enterprise version of DataStax Inc.’s Apache Cassandra-based database.

In addition to support for Kubernetes and Mesosphere’s DC/OS, Microsoft said it was releasing the code for its Azure Container Service Engine to the open-source community. The new GitHub project would share details on deploying DC/OS, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes and orchestrating containers on both the public cloud and on the Azure Stack, Sanders said.

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