Microsoft Open Sources Azure Container Service Engine

Containers have become so popular among organizations because they can run on any hardware, on any cloud, and in any environment without modification. Microsoft Azure Container Service (ACS) allows customers to manage containers in the cloud by offering a simple way for them to scale containers in production. Microsoft today announced a series of updates to ACS, read about them below.

• Kubernetes on Azure Container Service (preview): Microsoft today announced 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.
• DC/OS Upgrade to 1.8.4: They 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: Microsoft is open sourcing the ACS Engine that they used 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.

Microsoft is also enabling more streamlined agile development and container management through new updates, read about them below.

• Azure Container Registry: 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.
• VS, VSTS and VS Code integration and deployment to Azure Container Service: Microsoft is releasing 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.

Learn more about it here.