Microsoft has cashed in on one of the industry’s trending technologies, with the announcement of the general availability of the Azure Container Service.
The Microsoft container service was initially announced in September 2015 and released for public preview in February, is built on Opensource and offers a choice between DC/OS or Docker Swarm orchestration engines.
“I’m excited to announce the general availability of the Azure Container Service; the simplest, most open and flexible way to run your container applications in the cloud,” said Ross Gardler, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, on the company’s blog. “Organizations are already experimenting with container technology in an effort to understand what they mean for applications in the cloud and on-premises, and how to best use them for their specific development and IT operations scenarios.”
While the growth of containers technology has been documented in recent months, a number of industry commentators have been concerned about the understanding of the technology within enterprise organizations themselves. A recent survey from the Cloud & DevOps World event, highlighted 74% of respondents agreed with the statement “everyone has heard of containers, but no-one really understands what containers are.”
Aside from confusion surrounding the definition and use case of containers, the Microsoft team believe the growth of the technology is being stunted by the management and orchestration. While the technology does offer organizations numerous benefits, traditional means of managing such technologies has proven to be in-effective.
“Azure Container Service addresses these challenges by providing simplified configurations of proven open source container orchestration technology, optimized to run in the cloud,” said Gardler. “With just a few clicks you can deploy your container-based applications on a framework designed to help manage the complexity of containers deployed at scale, in production.”
Along the availability announcement, Microsoft has also joined a new open source DC/OS project enabling customers to use Mesosphere’s Data Center Operating System to orchestrate their containers projects. The project brings together the expertise of more than 50 partners to drive usability within the software-defined economy.
The Docker Swarm version ensures any Docker compliant tooling can be used in the service. Azure Container Service provides a ‘Docker native’ solution using the same open source technologies as Dockers Universal Control Plane, allowing customers to upgrade as and when required.