Just a day ahead of annual KubeCon conference, Microsoft has announced some of the significant changes to its Azure Container Service (ACS). The software giant is opting open source future for ACS by releasing the code for its engine as well as announcing Kubernetes integration.
Azure was certainly a major offering by Microsoft to reach enterprise customers. However, with the new updates to ACS, it gets a sharp edge over other cloud players such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. The Redmond company has preferred the open source way to bring the ASC engine to the developer community. This move has made ACS one of the first few cloud services with open access to its code.
“With ACS, we provide customers a unique approach to managing containers in the cloud by offering a simple way for them to scale containers in production through proven open source container orchestration technology,” said Corey Sanders, director of compute for Azure, Microsoft, in a blog post.
The engine’s code is aimed to enable best practices for orchestrating containers on Azure and let developers view the deployments of DC/OS, Swarm and Kubernetes from one place. Further, it helps in modifying and customising container implementations to suit particular projects.
Multiple orchestration engine support
Apart from the open source engine, Microsoft is natively integrating Kubernetes into ACS. This move has made Microsoft’s offering a step ahead of any other container services available today. Moreover, it enables Azure to support most of the popular container orchestration engines such as Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesosphere DC/OS.
“This deeper and native support for 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,” wrote Sanders.
Recently, Microsoft appointed Brendan Burns from Google to enable Kubernetes integration. Burns was one of the key members behind the open source project that was released by the search company in 2014.
DC/OS update
Microsoft has also upgraded DC/OS to version 1.8.4 to deliver an advanced experience on ACS. The new release includes flexible virtual networking capabilities and brings Marathon-based container orchestration baked into the DC/OS UI. Besides, the platform comes with installable GitLab, Artifactory, Confluent Platform and DataStrax Enterprise.
[…] developments are not exclusive to Microsoft Azure. However, its support for open source technologies apparently persuaded OpenAI to make it as the primary cloud […]