Containers are becoming increasing popular for developers. They let organizations virtualize an operating system, allowing them to deploy apps on any system or hardware without modification. They’re essentially a step forward from Virtual Machines, and Microsoft’s Azure Container Service is a popular tool to manage them.
Since yesterday, the source code of ACS Engine has been available to everyone. It also came with support for Kubernetes, Google’s open-source container cluster manager. With the update, Azure has become the first public cloud to support all mainstream container engines.
Azure Container Service Changelog
As well as the changes mentioned above, Microsoft has upgraded DC/OS support to 1.8.4, which comes with a number of new functionalities. Here’s what Director of Azure Compute Corey Sanders had to say about the update:
- “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.”
- “Kubernetes on Azure Container Service (preview): Today, we are…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.”
With the open-source availability, Microsoft will share with the community how these services are deployed. In turn, it hopes to receive help in developing best practices for containers on Azure. The source will also give developers to have more control over the modification of deployments. Investment from the community will hopefully lead to contributions and an overall better service.
Azure Container Registry
As well as expanding the availability and support of ACS, Microsoft is bringing some changes to container management. Primarily, it will be launching Azure Container Registry on November 14th.
ACR will act as a private repository for hosting container images that can bed used with Azure:
“You can store Docker-formatted images for all types of container deployments,” explains Sanders. “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.”
On that same day, Microsoft will add VS, VSTS and VS Code integration to Azure Container Service. Developers will be able to easily set up continuous deployment of multi-container Linux applications using the three programs.
Going forward, the Redmond giant expects to “to invest heavily in excellent dev-to-test-to-prod deployment experiences for container workloads using a choice of development and CI/CD solutions.”
If all of that sounds good, you can try the service for free today. Of course, you’ll have to wait a week for the ACR Preview, but you can read up on that here in the meantime.
