Now in preview: Azure Container Service

This week, Microsoft made a preview of Azure Container Service (ACS) available to customers, with the goal of providing a container hosting environment that uses open source tools and technologies popular among Microsoft customers today.


ACS is an Azure Compute resource provider to create and manage a cluster of virtual machines that act as container hosts together with a number of “master” machines that are used to orchestrate application containers. ACS provides an optimized configuration of popular open source scheduling and orchestration tools that enable customers to use existing skills to deploy and manage container-based applications on Microsoft Azure.


During the initial stages of the preview, those interested in participating can self-nominate and the Azure team will follow up via email. If you don’t have an Azure subscription, you can check out ACS by signing up for a free trial.


“This preview builds on our work with our partners Docker Inc. and Mesosphere to deliver a production ready container service based on Docker, Apache Mesos and open source components from Mesosphere’s Datacenter Operating System (DCOS), wrote Microsoft’s Ross Gardler, Azure Program Manager. “Together we have engaged with the open source communities to ensure that we can run these workloads optimally on Azure without compromising application portability for our customers.  This work continues and we look forward to further enhancing this service in the future.”


This preview currently supports Linux containers only. Microsoft has committed to providing Windows Server Containers using Docker and Apache Mesos is being ported to Windows. This work will allow Microsoft to add Windows Server Container support to Azure Container Service in the future.

For more on the Azure Container Service preview and how to get started, check out the Azure blog.

#itsTechHub
#Azure
@i_AnkurBiswas
https://www.facebook.com/Ankur-Biswas-802994119750335