Microsoft Launches General Availability of Kubernetes on Azure Container Service

Microsoft Azure announced on Tuesday that Kubernetes is now generally available on its Azure Container Service (ACS), after launching it in preview in November and gathering feedback from customers.

Microsoft launched the general availability of ACS in April 2016 to help organizations deploy and operate containerized application workloads.

With Kubernetes generally available, Windows Server customers using ACS get more choice in orchestrator. Customers can now preview both Docker Swarm and Kubernetes through ACS.

“Kubernetes is infrastructure for next generation applications, PaaS and more. Given this, I’m really excited by our announcement today that Kubernetes on Azure Container Service has reached general availability,” Brendan Burns, partner architect at Microsoft and co-founder of Kubernetes said in a blog post previewing his talk at Container World on Wednesday. “When you deploy your next generation application to Azure, whether on a PaaS or deployed directly onto Kubernetes itself (or both) you can deploy it onto a managed, supported Kubernetes cluster.”

Also on Tuesday Microsoft announced that it is updating its DC/OS support to version 1.8.8, delivering the open source version, and providing additional enterprise features to customers who require it through its Mesosphere partnership, initially announced last April.

“We love hearing from our customers about how they are using containers on Azure and the benefits it brings to their application development lifecycle,” Saurya Das, Program Manager II, Azure Linux said in a blog post. “BioCatch, a startup based out of Israel, builds real time fraud prevention software that went from a PoC into production on ACS in a matter of weeks. Stories like this show the power of container-based applications and get us excited about the possibilities – we hope to hear from you, too.”