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Microsoft Adds Kubernetes Management to Azure

New features, including elastic sizing, were added as well.

• By Keith Ward
• 02/21/2017

The mainstreaming of container technology took another step forward today when Microsoft announced that the Kubernetes management framework is available for its Azure public cloud.

Saurya Das, an "Azure Linux" Program Manager for Microsoft, announced on a blog that Kubernetes, a Linux-based open source technology originally developed by Google, is available on the Azure Container Service (ACS). ACS is optimized for container applications. Kubernetes' most important functions are to manage clusters of containers, providing orchestration of operations, scaling and deployment.

Kubernetes support on ACS was first announced in November 2016. Since then, Microsoft has added several new features based on customer feedback. TechCrunch reported that they include the ability to elastically scale clusters up or down (previously, resizing a cluster meant tearing it down), and "support for support for high-availability setups with multiple masters."

For those looking to run ACS in production, the Kubernetes announcement also means that Microsoft will offer service-level agreements and support contracts. Das said that "With today's news, we again deliver on our goal of providing our customers the choice of open-source orchestrators and tooling that simplifies the deployment of container based applications in the cloud."

With the addition of Kubernetes, Azure now supports three of the most popular container management services; the other two are Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm. Das claimed that Azure is the only public cloud platform to offer all three, and said that it points to Microsoft's continuing embrace of open source technology: "ACS's approach of openness has been pivotal in driving the adoption of containers on Azure."