Microsoft is making moves in the container market, with the next phase of support for containerised applications on Azure.

The company will be providing an Azure Container Service Resource Provider for its Azure Resource Manager, additionally it has made available an early prototype implementation of this service. This comes in the form of Azure QuickStart Template.

The key benefit of ARM, is that it should make it easy to create and manage clusters of hosts that are pre-configured with Docker, Apache Mesos, Marathon and Docker Swarm.

Supporting Linux and Windows Server containers, the company is building two types of Windows containers directly into the Windows Server 2016.

Mesosphere’s Datacentre Operating System, is designed to allow customers the ability to manage both virtualised and non-virtualised datacentres. It achieves this by treating them as if they were one large machine by creating a single elastic pool of resources.

Mesosphere is based on the Apache Mesos cluster manager and can support diverse workloads on the same cluster, this includes those from Chronos, Hadoop, Spark, Cassandra and Google Kubernetes.

The company in a blog post said that it has plans for more features in the future, but the first goal of the Azure Container Service is to simplify the creation and configuration of a cluster.

For UK users Azure is hosted from the Microsoft mega data centre in Dublin which it is continuing to expand.

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