Microsoft shows off its SQL Server in a Linux container

Ephraim Batambuze III June 22, 2016

Less than a minute

Yesterday, Microsoft announced new capabilities for running applications in containers, which is an alternative to more traditional virtual machines in both Azure public cloud and in companies’ on-premises data centers.

Mark Russinovich, Azure’s chief technology officer demonstrated some of the new features at Docker’s Dockercon conference in Seattle.

Russinovich showed an example of a container cluster provisioned by Docker Datacenter that’s running on top of infrastructure in Azure and private-cloud infrastructure managed by Microsoft’s Azure Stack software.

Russinovich also showed the next step in Microsoft’s journey to bring its SQL Server database software beyond Windows. He also showed SQL Server on Linux running inside a container that’s managed by Docker Datacenter — in a virtual machine on Azure Stack.

Microsoft also launched the Azure Container Service and on premises, Microsoft has introduced Hyper-V Containers in Windows Server.

Microsoft finally shared a statistic on adoption of Linux inside Azure.

“In just a year’s time we’ve gone from 1 in 4 of our Azure virtual machines running Linux, to nearly 1 in 3,” Russinovich wrote in his blog post.