Software container company CoreOS Inc. is making its technology more accessible with the general availability of its “self-driving Kubernetes platform” Tectonic on the Microsoft Azure cloud.

The move comes as CoreOS announces the simultaneous release of Tectonic 1.7, which comes with improvements such as automated operations enabling one-click updates of Kubernetes, and monitoring alerts. CoreOS said the availability of Tectonic on Microsoft Azure means that it has delivered on its vision of bringing more freedom and portability to the cloud. Containers are portable software wrappers for applications, enabling them to run unchanged on multiple computers and operating systems.

Tectonic, which was already available on Amazon Web Services’ cloud, is an all-encompassing container technology stack that combines the CoreOS operating system with Kubernetes, the Google-backed open-source project for managing container applications. It’s designed to provide easy access to Kubernetes, and also a way for companies to securely run containers inside a distributed environment that’s similar to how Google runs its own infrastructure. It’s essentially a complete stack of tools that organizations need to get started with containers, including the CoreOS operating system, the etcd key-value store, the Flannel networking fabric and the Rocket container runtime CoreOS built as an alternative to Docker’s runtime.

“This major release of Tectonic and stable release on Microsoft Azure is an important step to deliver on the promise of multicloud, making infrastructure and operations more efficient and scalable,” said Rob Szumski, CoreOS’s product manager for Tectonic. “Tectonic on Azure saves you time and money by building your Kubernetes infrastructure correctly from the beginning and speeding up deployment cycles. With the ability to do hybrid cloud deployments, infrastructure leaders have the freedom and flexibility of a platform that does not lock users into cloud compute and cloud services.”

CoreOS is confident that it’s going to see big demand for Tectonic on Azure. The company cited analyst firm RightScale Inc.’s recent 2017 State of the Cloud report as evidence that enterprises are under increasing pressure to bring applications to market faster in order to stay competitive. The report noted that 85 percent of enterprises have adopted a multi-cloud strategy in order to achieve this. CoreOS said Tectonic is ideal to help companies do so, as it provides a single platform through which they can run, manage, scale and share resources across multiple cloud platforms to support increase application workloads.

The new Tectonic release gains a number of features that should make it more useful for enterprises. Version 1.7 comes with the latest Kubernetes 1.7 release, one-click upgrade functionality with no downtime, and a new monitoring alerts feature that makes it easier to monitor the health of Kubernetes clusters running in production.

Image: CoreOS