Docker launches command line interface for Windows

San Francisco startup Docker, whose Linux container technology for packaging up application code has become trendy among developers and increasingly among operations people, has made a command line interface available to run on Microsoft Windows.

The new Windows port of the Docker client — part of today’s Docker version 1.6 release — is available through the boot2docker project or the Chocolatey package manager, Microsoft software engineer Ahmet Alp Balkan wrote in a blog post today on the news, which Microsoft and Docker are jointly announcing.

It’s the result of months of work between Microsoft and Docker.

But it isn’t the first time Microsoft and Docker are collaborating. They’re working together to bring Docker containers to the Windows Server operating system for servers. Just last week Microsoft announced that it would roll out Hyper-V Containers managed by Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor software.

Linux containers, which Docker has popularized in the past two years, represent competition to the virtual machines that Hyper-V and other hypervisor software products operate. So Microsoft — as well as virtualization giant VMware — has been quick to embrace Docker and its containers.

“It’s interesting to realize how much of your software is programmed for a certain operating system, so we are thankful to have the Windows expertise available to help guide us through the process,” Docker said in its blog post on today’s news.

Earlier this week Docker announced a $95 million funding round.