Microsoft announced the launch of its third Technical Preview of Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016, which includes the release of the first public preview of Windows Server Containers as well as new Nano Server functionality and software-defined datacenter enhancements.

“Delivering applications quickly is key to staying competitive in today’s fast-paced business environment,” Microsoft says. “To respond, many organizations are looking for ways to accelerate how they move applications from development into production and continuously improve them to respond to business changes. DevOps-oriented tools and processes, which offer agile innovation and faster time to market, are empowering both developers and IT to meet this demand and drive new levels of value to their business. Containers are increasingly seen as an ideal solution to embrace DevOps giving developers increased agility while reducing operations management challenges for IT.”

With Windows Server Containers, the company aims to bring such benefits to its customers.

“Windows Server Containers create a highly agile Windows Server environment, enabling you to accelerate the DevOps process to efficiently build and deploy modern applications,” it says. “Through this release, millions of Windows developers will be able to experience the benefits of containers for the first time using the languages of their choice – whether.NET, ASP.NET, and PowerShell or Python, Ruby on Rails, Java and many others.”

The news builds on a partnership with Docker Microsoft announced in October to offer container and DevOps benefits to Linux and Windows Server users. Windows Server Containers are part of the Docker open source project and can be deployed/managed using PowerShell or the Docker client.

On the Nano Server front, they’ve added a new Emergency Management Console and for software-defined networking, they’re providing a scalable network controller and a software load balancer for higher availability and performance.

More details on all of it here.

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