Containers are the next evolution in virtualization, enabling organizations to be more agile than ever before. 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.

With Azure Container Service (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. Today we are announcing a series of updates to ACS that continue to demonstrate ACS is the most streamlined, open and flexible way to run your container applications in the cloud — providing even more customer choice in their cloud orchestrator. These updates, available today, include:

• Kubernetes on Azure Container Service (preview): In July 2014, roughly a month after Kubernetes became publicly available, we announced support for Kubernetes on Azure infrastructure. Kubernetes 1.4 offered support for native Azure networking, load-balancer and Azure disk integration. Today, we are taking this support even further and announcing the preview release of Kubernetes 1.4 on Azure Container Service. This deeper and native support of 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. You can read more here from Brendan Burns, one of the founders of Kubernetes, for his view on Kubernetes on ACS.
• DC/OS Upgrade to 1.8.4: We’re pleased to share we have upgraded ACS support for DC/OS to version 1.8.4. This new version includes flexible new virtual networking capabilities along with job-scheduling and Marathon-based container orchestration baked right into the DC/OS UI. In addition, GitLab, Artifactory, Confluent Platform, DataStax Enterprise and our own Operations Management Suite are now available for one-click installation from the DC/OS Universe app store.
• Open Source Azure Container Service Engine: Today, we are releasing the source code for the ACS Engine we use to create Azure Container Service deployments in Azure. This new open source project on GitHub will allow us to share with the community how we deploy DC/OS, Swarm and Kubernetes and collaborate on best practices for orchestrating containers on Azure, both public and on Azure Stack. Furthermore, with the ACS Engine, you can modify and customize deployments of the service beyond what is possible today. Finally, with your help, we can take contributions from the community and improve the service running in Azure.

We are seeing organizations of every size move their container-based solutions from dev/test environments to production in the cloud, especially as they discover the business agility opportunities containers make possible. In addition to delivering more choice and flexibility on ACS, we’re also enabling more streamlined agile development and container management through new updates, including these:

• Azure Container Registry: Available in preview on Nov. 14, the Azure Container Registry is a private repository for hosting container images for use on Azure. Using the Azure Container Registry, you can store Docker-formatted images for all types of container deployments. In addition, the Azure Container Registry integrates well with the orchestrator offered by the Azure Container Service. When you use the Azure Container Registry, you will find it compatible with the open source Docker Registry v2 so you can use the same tools on ACR.
• VS, VSTS and VS Code integration and deployment to Azure Container Service: Also on November 16, we will release a new experience to enable you to easily set up continuous integration and deployment of multicontainer Linux applications using Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services and the open source Visual Studio Code. To continue enabling deployment agility, we expect to invest heavily in excellent dev-to-test-to-prod deployment experiences for container workloads using a choice of development and CI/CD solutions.

Azure is the only public cloud with a container service that offers a choice of open source orchestration technologies, DC/OS, Docker Swarm and Kubernetes, making it easier for you and your team to adopt containers in the cloud using the tools you love. You can get these agile benefits and more! Go try out DC/OS, Swarm or Kubernetes, on Azure Container Service today! If you want to see more, make sure you watch Microsoft Connect(); next week!

See ya around,

Corey