Last fall, Microsoft announced a Docker partnership and Windows Server and Azure integrations.

The company recently put up a blog post about running ASP.NET 5 apps in Linux containers with Docker. It says it’s actively working on making apps written in ASP.NET 5 easy to desploy and ship in Linux and Mac OS X.

Microsoft recently released its first official Docker image – the ASP.NET 5 Preview Docker Image, which you can use as a base image where bits are already installed to run on Linux. Just add your app to the image and ship it to have it run in an app container.

The company’s blog post serves as a tutorial for deploying an app to a Linux Virtual Machine running Azure cloud using Docker. Microsoft says:

The tutorial can be executed on a Linux or Mac OS X machine where Docker client is installed (or you can ssh into the Linux VM you will use). Once Windows client for Docker is available, you will be able to run these commands on Windows and once Windows Server container support comes out you will be able to use Docker to manage Windows Server containers.

NOTE: Both ASP.NET 5 (vNext) and the Docker image are in preview and the following instructions are subject to change in the future. Please refer to Docker Hub page and GitHub repository for latest documentation on how to use the Docker image for ASP.NET 5.

The post consists of four main steps: creating a Linux VM with Docker, Creating a container image for your app, building the container image, and running the container.

Microsoft says it will continue to invest in running ASP.NET 5 apps on Linux and Docker.

Image via Microsoft