Azure Container Service Arrives, Integrates with Mesosphere's DC/OS

We previously covered Mesosphere's big announcement that it is open sourcing the primary parts of its Data Center Operating System, and has rallied many powerful partners around the platform, including Microsoft. In conjunction with that news, Microsoft has announced that its Azure Container Service, launched as a preview back in December, is also now ready for commercial use.

It supports Docker container images, and can make containerized applications portable across "any cloud and on-premises" environments, according to Microsoft. Like Google with its open source Kubernetes project, Microsoft is paying close attention to the container space and is pursuing an open source strategy for participating.

According to Microsoft:

"As organizations adopt containers and look to scale them in production, they discover that deploying and operating containerized application workloads is a non-trivial exercise. The complexity of tracking and managing high-density containers at scale grows at an exponential rate, making traditional, hands-on management approaches ineffective."

"Azure Container Service addresses these challenges by providing simplified configurations of proven open source container orchestration technology, optimized to run in the cloud. 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."

"We built Azure Container Service to be the fastest way to get the benefits of running containerized applications, using your choice of open source technology, tools and skills and with the support of a thriving community and ecosystem."

"With Docker image support and our commitment to open source software in the orchestration layer, your application is fully portable across any cloud and on-premises. Unlike other container services, the Azure Container Service is built on 100% open source software to maximize portability of workloads and offers a choice among popular orchestration engines: DC/OS or Docker Swarm."

 You might not have seen this kind of commitment to open source from Microsoft a few years ago, but the company is changing on that front. CEO Satya Nadella (shown above) is definitely pushing that notion. Several media outlets reported on his comments on how he "loves Linux" and he has claimed that approximately 30 percent of Microsoft's Azure cloud is already Linux-based. Microsoft is also leveraging an open source and community-driven model to encourage developers to make useful add-ins for Office apps, in order to evolve the ecosystem of third-party applications and services that work with its productivity applications.

Containers are a new frontier for Microsoft. "Lately it seems like you can’t have a discussion about cloud computing without also talking about the benefit of container ecosystems for development agility and portability," writes Ross Gardler, Senior Program Manager, Azure . "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."