Microsoft and Docker Team up for Cloud-Native App Bundles Standard

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This week, Microsoft is hosting its Connect (); conference where the company dives deeper into its development tools and platforms to help developers better understand the tools available for building applications. At the event, Microsoft announced a new industry standard for a universal installer for cloud-native application bundles for distributed systems.

While that name is a mouthful, the underlying concept is quite simple. Microsoft and Docker have created an open source, cloud-agnostic specification for packaging and running distributed applications. Called Cloud Native Application Bundle (CNAB), the platform is designed to work with Azure and Docker to on-prem software like OpenStack and Kubernetes.

Microsoft and Docker are providing open source tools to help customers get started with the software that allows you to define resources that can be deployed to any combination of runtime environments. Meaning, CNAB can be run on everything from a workstation, public cloud, to an IoT environment.

The goal of the new standard is to make it easier to work with and deploy applications across environments. Rarely is an organization using a single runtime which means it has to manage each platform and deployment with its own provisioning tools; Microsoft and Docker are hoping to reduce the complexity and make it easier to work in these types of environments.

Seeing as this ‘standard’ is only becoming available today, the real test will be if other organizations will adopt and embrace the tooling. While Microsoft and Docker are a good first step, there are other notable players who will need to throw their weight behind to standard for it to truly become a ‘standard’ of the industry.