A few days ago, Docker has announced a partnership with Microsoft. With this, Docker will soon become the de facto standard for containerization, a technology that makes rolling out complex software with lots of dependencies significantly easier and also isolates each solution with its own file system and resources – all without significant performance losses (unlike traditional VMs). Protogrid uses this technology extensively and we have thus gathered lots of Docker know-how at ATEGRA’s Cloud Innovation Team. In the future, this new partnership will allow Protogrid (and also Sharepoint, for example) to be rolled out with a single console command on a Windows server, after which it can be operated in isolation from the rest of the system. I suspect ESX, Citrix and co. to become obsolete in this new era of virtualization.

In the coming years there should be a boom of PaaS, since it is becoming increasingly simple to operate such services.

Satya Nadella appears to understand well the needs of the Enterprise – Microsoft has had some good news coming up since about one year. We’ll have to wait and see for the implementation, but I’m expecting lots of simplifications for Windows, especially server side. From Microsoft’s point of view this seems very much necessary since OpenSource technologies are becoming stronger by the day, especially looking at configuration and dependency management on Linux.