Microsoft continues to plug away at the container space, announcing a plugin for its Azure Container Service (ACS) into the Jenkins open source automation server.

The plugin is designed to be compatible with any ACS orchestrator, including Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, or Mesos DC/OS. Developers using the plugin are able to continuously deploy to their chosen cluster from Jenkins.

Pui Chee Chan, senior program manager at Microsoft, said the company developed the plugin after it failed to find an option allowing for native continuous deployment from Jenkins to Kubernetes.

“So we decided to create one, as we think it would be extremely valuable to both the Jenkins and Kubernetes communities,” Chan wrote in a blog post. “Our ACS plugin uses this plugin as a dependency for Kubernetes support.”

Microsoft describes Jenkins as being able to “initiate and monitor the execution of a task, check the outcome, and initiate the next stage.” It can handle organization of various DevOps platforms like Chef, Puppet, and Docker into a single pipeline for easier management.

The Jenkins plugin also supports Microsoft’s Azure Container Instances (ACI) platform, which it began previewing in July. ACI does not need any virtual machine (VM) infrastructure to manage it and allows containers to be deployed and billed by the second.

Microsoft has been quickly adding support for container platforms, including a specific focus on Kubernetes. The computing giant recently joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which houses the Kubernetes project.

According to a survey conducted as part of a recent SDxCentral report on container and cloud orchestration, 64 percent of respondents said they were using Kubernetes, 36 percent said they were using Swarm, and 18 percent said they were using Mesos. The survey included the option for multiple answers.