The Azure Container Service from Microsoft is now generally available for deploying and scheduling cloud-based containers after emerging in preview in December 2015. Built on “100% open source software to maximize portability of workloads,” the Azure Container Service offers a choice of Mesosphere’s Data Center Operating System (DC/OS) or Docker Swarm for container orchestration. The Azure Container Service allows customers to deploy and manage cloud-based containers at scale in ways that are optimized for the Azure cloud but concomitantly enable portability across any infrastructure that supports Mesosphere or Docker Swarm. The platform refrains from prescribing a specific orchestration framework for a customer’s various use cases and workloads and currently does not support the Google’s Kubernetes container management infrastructure. Today’s news tightens the partnership between Microsoft and Mesosphere, the latter of which just announced its decision to open source its DC/OS software in collaboration with over 60 partners including Microsoft. Meanwhile, the Azure Container Service continues to testify to Microsoft’s transformation under Satya Nadella as evinced by its embrace of open source technologies such as Docker and DC/OS and a broader vision about the place of open source technologies in contemporary cloud computing per its November 2015 selection of Red Hat at the preferred vendor for enterprise Linux on Azure.
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