Those who attended or watched Cisco Live’s opening keynotes earlier this week – or indeed read our story on it – will have recognised the importance of Kubernetes to attendees with Google Cloud’s cameo being a particular highlight.

Now Microsoft is making waves of its own – with the general availability of its Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS).

The move will see Microsoft add five new regions of availability, with two in the US, two in Europe – including one in the UK – and the other in Australia, bringing the total number up to 10. Microsoft said it hoped to double its reach in the coming months.

Earlier this month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon EKS, its managed Kubernetes service, with regions operational in US East and US West and rapid expansion promised.

The major providers are therefore all in the race to become the most developer and company-friendly resource on which to build and manage Kubernetes projects. Google, of course, as the original designer of the orchestration system, is a bit further ahead with its Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) being a focal point of the Cisco and Google partnership elaborated on this week.

“With AKS in all these regions, users from around the world, or with applications that span the world, can deploy and manage their production Kubernetes applications with the confidence that Azure’s engineers are providing constant monitoring, operations, and support for our customers’ fully managed Kubernetes clusters,” wrote Brendan Burns, Microsoft Azure distinguished engineer in a blog post confirming the news.

“Azure was also the first cloud to offer a free managed Kubernetes service and we continue to offer it for free in GA,” Burns added. “We think you should be able to use Kubernetes without paying for our management infrastructure.”

You can find out more about the news here.