Microsoft open sources Azure Container Service
Tue 8 Nov 2016
Microsoft has released its Azure Container Service (ACS) to the open source community, as the tech giant seeks to work alongside contributors on improving the code underlying ACS deployments.
The open source release will see Microsoft develop interoperability and support of the ACS Engine across three different container orchestration platforms; Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS and Docker Swarm. The move will see Microsoft become the first public cloud provider to support all of the most popular pieces of orchestration software.
‘Containers are the next evolution in virtualization, enabling organizations to be more agile than ever before,’ wrote Azure’s Director of Compute, Corey Sanders, in an official blog post.
‘I see this from customers every day! They can write their app once and deploy everywhere, whether dev, test or production. Containers can run on any hardware, on any cloud, and in any environment without modification. In short, they offer a truly open and portable solution for agile DevOps,’ he continued.
The container announcements come after Microsoft hired former Google engineer Brendan Burns earlier in 2016. Burns worked as one of the founders on Kubernetes and continues to contribute to the container management project at Microsoft.
Kubernetes was first made available in open source in 2014 by Google, before being handed over to the Linux Foundation and its Cloud Native Computing Foundation collaboration.
Microsoft also announced the open preview of its Azure Container Registry (ACR) – a service which allows container images to be stored and retrieved over its public cloud platform. The complete version will be made available from the 14th November.
Also on this date, the tech firm is expected to launch a new set of tools for the integration and deployment of multi-container Linux applications using Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and the Visual Studio Code editor.
