Microsoft announces numerous improvements to ACS, and among them the most notable is Kubernetes, which is now generally available as one of the three choices of orchestrator.
Microsoft Azure is the only public cloud platform that provides a container service with the choice of the three most popular open source orchestrators available.
Image Source: azure.microsoft.com
“We again deliver on our goal of providing our customers the choice of open-source orchestrators and tooling that simplifies the deployment of container based applications in the cloud.”
The ACS team announces their next wave of features which include.
- Kubernetes now generally available (GA) – Microsoft announces preview support for Kubernetes in November 2016. Since then, they have received feedback from customers, and based on this feedback, the company has improved Kubernetes support and now moved it to GA. For more details, check here.
- Preview of Windows Server Containers with Kubernetes – Microsoft states that the latest Kubernetes release is adding support for Windows Server Containers, coupled with enterprise customers expressing strong interest in adopting and going into production with Windows Server Containers. Users will now be able to preview both Docker Swarm along with Kubernetes though ACS, providing users choices, in addition to two of the top three Linux container orchestration platforms.
- DC/OS 1.8.8 update – Microsoft will also update their DC/OS support to version 1.8.8. DC/OS is a production-proven platform that elastically powers both containers and big data services. Key features of 1.8.8 include a new orchestration framework, called Metronome, to run scheduled jobs. This has been added to a new Jobs tab in the DC/OS UI, along with a number of other UI improvements; and the addition of GPU and CNI support in the Universal container runtime. Based on Apache Mesos, DC/OS is trusted by Esri, BioCatch and many other Fortune 1000 companies.
Brendan Burns, Partner Architect at Microsoft and co-founder of Kubernetes, states,
"Kubernetes is infrastructure for next generation applications, PaaS and more. Given this, I’m really excited by our announcement today that Kubernetes on Azure Container Service has reached general availability. When you deploy your next generation application to Azure, whether on a PaaS or deployed directly onto Kubernetes itself (or both) you can deploy it onto a managed, supported Kubernetes cluster."