Azure Container Service (ACS) provides enterprise customers a different way of managing containers in the cloud using Azure. Containers can run on any hardware and in any cloud environment, allowing for virtualization anywhere. Containers offer an open and portable solution for agile DevOps. Starting today, ACS is offering a number of updates to show how ACS is the best way to run container applications in the cloud.
Available today, here’s a look at the ACS updates:
- Kubernetes on Azure Container Service (preview): In July 2014, roughly a month after Kubernetes became publicly available, we announced support for Kubernetes on Azure infrastructure. Kubernetes 1.4 offered support for native Azure networking, load-balancer and Azure disk integration. Today, we are taking this support even further and announcing the preview release of Kubernetes 1.4 on Azure Container Service. This deeper and native support of Kubernetes will provide you another fully open source choice for your container orchestration engine on Azure. Now, customers will have more options to choose their cloud orchestrator with ACS providing support for three fully open source solutions in DC/OS, Docker Swarm and Kubernetes. You can read more here from Brendan Burns, one of the founders of Kubernetes, for his view on Kubernetes on ACS.
- DC/OS Upgrade to 1.8.4: We’re pleased to share we have upgraded ACS support for DC/OS to version 1.8.4. This new version includes flexible new virtual networking capabilities along with job-scheduling and Marathon-based container orchestration baked right into the DC/OS UI. In addition, GitLab, Artifactory, Confluent Platform, DataStax Enterprise and our own Operations Management Suite are now available for one-click installation from the DC/OS Universe app store.
- Open Source Azure Container Service Engine: Today, we are releasing the source code for the ACS Engine we use to create Azure Container Service deployments in Azure. This new open source project on GitHub will allow us to share with the community how we deploy DC/OS, Swarm and Kubernetes and collaborate on best practices for orchestrating containers on Azure, both public and on Azure Stack. Furthermore, with the ACS Engine, you can modify and customize deployments of the service beyond what is possible today. Finally, with your help, we can take contributions from the community and improve the service running in Azure.
Microsoft is seeing many container-based solutions, including dev/test environments and production in the cloud. In addition to the aforementioned updates on ACS, Microsoft is also adding a more streamlined agile development and container management system with the following updates:
- Azure Container Registry: Available in preview on Nov. 14, the Azure Container Registry is a private repository for hosting container images for use on Azure. Using the Azure Container Registry, you can store Docker-formatted images for all types of container deployments. In addition, the Azure Container Registry integrates well with the orchestrator offered by the Azure Container Service. When you use the Azure Container Registry, you will find it compatible with the open source Docker Registry v2 so you can use the same tools on ACR.
- VS, VSTS and VS Code integration and deployment to Azure Container Service: Also on Nov. 14, we will release a new experience to enable you to easily set up continuous integration and deployment of multicontainer Linux applications using Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services and the open source Visual Studio Code. To continue enabling deployment agility, we expect to invest heavily in excellent dev-to-test-to-prod deployment experiences for container workloads using a choice of development and CI/CD solutions.
Get started using Azure Container Service with DC/OS, Swarm or Kubernetes. Microsoft will be announcing more news on Azure Container Service at Microsoft Connect(); //2016.
Further reading: Azure, Azure Container Service, Cloud Services, Containers, Microsoft, Microsoft Connect, Virtualization
