Microsoft Open-Sources Azure Container Services Engine

Microsoft on Monday announced a number of updates to Azure Container Services that it says will make the container service more open and flexible.

First up: The Kubernetes cloud orchestrator is now available in preview for Azure Container Services. This gives ACS customers a choice of orchestration technologies, with support for DC/OS, Swarm and Kubernetes.

Microsoft is also open-sourcing the engine it uses to create Azure Container Service deployments, with the code available on GitHub. “This new open source project…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,” reads a Microsoft blog post.

“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.”

Containerization is becoming increasingly popular as a virtualization technology for businesses. Microsoft has also promised to unveil a new integration of Visual Studio and Azure Container Services for developers. Set to drop November 14, the new experience will allow developers 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,” according to Microsoft.