ORLANDO, Florida – Microsoft unleashed a wave of new enterprise Azure cloud products and services this week, which included greater support for containers and serverless computing.

The container support includes general availability of its Service Fabric on Linux. The product is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering that supports running containerized applications on Service Fabric for Windows Server and Linux.

Developers can manage container images, allocate resources, run service discovery, and tap insight from operation management suite (OMS) integration. This work can then be ported between Windows Server and Linux without needing to alter code.

The product initially supports Ubuntu distribution, with plans to add others like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) “on the roadmap.”

Microsoft last year announced initial general availability of Azure Fabric Service.

The product also continues Microsoft’s embracing of Linux, which at one point in history had been considered by management as a “cancer.”

Serverless computing also received a boost, with Microsoft integrating its Azure Functions product into its Azure Cosmos DB cloud management platform. The combined product allows for developers to use event-driven serverless computing at scale across the Azure cloud platform.

Azure Cosmos DB is designed to provide user control to scale database throughput and storage across regions. Service level agreements (SLAs) are also supported for latency, throughput, availability, and consistency.

Combined, the products can create a Cosmos DB trigger to run inside of a Function deployment; bind a Function to a Cosmos DB container so it can read data from the container when a function is triggered; and output data from a completed function to a container.

Microsoft launched its Azure Functions serverless computing product last year as a competitor to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Lambda platform.

Serverless computing is designed to reduce the amount of overhead associated with offering services in the cloud. This includes the ability for a cloud provider to dynamically manage server resources.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella quickly mentioned container and serverless computing as part of the “new computing paradigm” during a keynote address at this week’s Microsoft Ignite event.

At the opposite end of the cloud scale, Microsoft took a step back with the launch of its Azure Data Box. That’s right: a physical box.

The product allows for the secure migration of up to 100 terabytes of data into the Azure cloud using real-world appliances like a shipping service and people. This means that an enterprise would order the box, have it shipped to their premises, load that box up with data, ship it back to Microsoft, and have that data uploaded into their Azure cloud platform.

The product is similar to Google’s Transfer Appliance that was launched in July, and AWS’ Snowball. IBM also rolled out a data migration appliance last week.