Atlantic.Net brings Windows Container support to its cloud hosting platform

Atlantic.Net, the Florida-based hosting provider, today announced that its users can now use Windows Server Containers on its platform to bring their existing Windows workloads into the cloud.

While many of the larger cloud providers like AWS and Google also offer support for Windows containers on their virtual machines and dedicated container platforms, Atlantic.Net’s more direct competitors like DigitalOcean and Linode typically only offer support for Linux distributions (though OVH, for example, does feature Windows Server support, too).

Atlantic.Net’s CEO Marty Puranik tells me that in order to enable this, the company is launching a container-ready image of Windows Server 2016 beside the standard Windows Server 2016 image. This means developers won’t have to go through PowerShell to download and install extensions to start working with containers.

Puranik noted that he’s mostly seeing demand from DevOps groups that want to move their Windows applications into the cloud and he expects that quite a few companies will also want to use this new service to quickly test and deploy containers on Windows Server 2016. He also tells me that his company may look at launching a dedicated container service if there’s enough customer demand for it, but for now, the company wants to give businesses a platform for deploying and scaling their Windows Containers.

“As a side note: because we deploy virtual machines much faster than AWS and have faster SSD Raid10 local storage the whole experience is much better — server is ready faster, it just does everything more snappy — and you get redundancy on the server storage as well,” Puranik noted. “So once people try our environment, they don’t want to go back.”

Windows Server hosting plans at Atlantic.Net currently start at $0.0208 per hour (or $14 per month).