Heading into Docker’s annual company conference (DockerCon) next week in Austin, Texas, Microsoft and Docker are making a case that the combination of the former’s cloud and the latter’s development platform is the only cloud solution any enterprise needs.

Everything going on in the cloud happens in the context of Amazon Web Services' (AWS’) continuing market dominance. Microsoft, as one of several also-rans looking to sustain long-term participation in the market, is working to ensconce itself in the enterprise segment of the cloud market by playing off two significant assets: its Azure cloud and its position as a leading supplier of enterprise IT products, notably the Windows operating system and Office 365.

Microsoft is aware that there’s a mania for open-source technology, and that Windows is decidedly not open source. A need for a partner that could support both Windows and open-source Linux was a key impetus for Microsoft aligning itself last September with Docker. Microsoft added the commercial version of the Docker Engine into Windows Server 2016.

In a recent blog post on the Microsoft Azure site, the two companies are now touting their approach as “One platform, one journey for all applications.” The combination of Docker’s cross platform support of Linux and Windows containers and Microsoft cloud technologies, they said, can support virtually every enterprise workload.

The two went on to say that, “Microsoft and Docker aim to provide a modern platform for developers and IT pros to build, ship, and run any application on-premises, in the cloud, or through service providers across both Windows and Linux operating systems. Together we are bringing container applications across platforms, integrating across our developer tools, the operating system, and cloud infrastructure to provide a seamless experience across the application environment from development to test and production.”

They asserted that Azure Container Service provides the simplest way to deploy a container orchestration environment, such as Docker Swarm, so developers will be able to deploy their apps more quickly.