Microsoft open sources its Azure Container Service engine
In April this year, Microsoft made Azure Container Service generally available. Today, November 7, Microsoft announced it is open sourcing the engine at the heart of ACS.
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).
The open-sourced ACS Engine, available 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," said officials in a blog post today.
Microsoft plans to take contributions from the community to improve the service.
Microsoft also announced today that the preview of Kubernetes running natively on ACS is now available. (Microsoft first announced plans to work with Google on its Kubernetes container-management technology back in 2014.)
And on November 14, Microsoft plans to release "a new experience" to allow developers to set up integration and deployment of multi-container Linux apps using Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Visual Studio Code.
Microsoft will likely announce more developer and open-source news next week at its Connect() event in New York City on November 16 and 17.