Guidance to Get You Started with Microsoft Azure and CoreOS

Microsoft Azure made some pretty big news last week and one of the things I’m especially jazzed about is the added support for CoreOS, a new Linux distribution designed specifically for warehouse scale computing environments.

Since its release earlier this year, CoreOS has taken the Linux developer community by storm, and for good reason. The coding experience is ideally suited for building highly scalable cloud apps, the use of Linux containers gives you greater flexibility in packaging and deploying apps, and you can rest assured knowing that you’re always running on the most recent security and performance updates.

With Azure and CoreOS working together, developers will have an easier time creating rich app experiences that scale to the demands of a constantly expanding user base.

And with cluster management tools like fleet, managing apps is also easier. Fleet lets you build smaller apps that are optimized for server cluster environments, and like any infrastructure as code technology it gives developers greater control over how the application runs within the cluster, taking some of the burden off of system admins as they grapple with the challenges of distributed computing systems. It’s a great example of the DevOps workflow, and how tools like CoreOS, fleet and Docker can help companies get a better handle on their distributed computing systems.

Here in DX we’ve been looking forward to putting CoreOS through its paces for quite some time. In fact, Tim Park and Patrick Chanezon have already been up to their elbows in it.

Tim created a Quickstart guide that walks you through the process of creating a Docker container for a simple Node.js application, while Patrick took a bit of a deeper dive around using fleet and explained how to deploy a sample app using the Spring framework with Mongo DB.

There’s a lot here to benefit both startups and enterprise developers, so don’t waste any time. Get busy and give us your feedback in the comments.