Microsoft Open Sources the Container Engine Central to Azure
It's a milestone season for Microsoft on the open source front. As we reported, the company recently released a new open-source UWP Community Toolkit that eases app development by streamlining new capabilities (helper functions, custom controls and app services) that simplify common developer tasks. Earlier this year, Microsoft also made Azure Container Service generally available. On the heels of that move, the company is now pen sourcing the engine that is actually central to Azure Container Service.
As noted on ZDNet: "Azure Container Service (ACS) allows developers to orchestrate applications using Apache Mesos or Docker Swarm. ACS also enables users to migrate container workloads to and from Azure without code changes, according to Microsoft. ACS built on top of work the Azure team had done with Docker and Mesosphere to deliver a production ready container service that was based on Docker, Apache Mesos, and open source components from Mesosphere's Datacenter Operating System (DCOS)." Here is more from Microsoft.
You can now get the ACS engine on GitHub.
According to Corey Sanders, Director of Compute for Azure:
"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.
Microsoft has said that it will seek contributions from the open source community on this project.