Microsoft will “retire” its Azure Container Service next month, in favour of its Kubernetes powered alternative.
Microsoft debuted its Azure Container Service just two and a half years ago, describing it as “the simplest, most open and flexible way to run your container applications in the cloud”. For orchestration, it supported both DC/OS and Docker Swarm.
Well that was then, and now simplifying Kubernetes is where it’s at in the container world – at least as far as Microsoft is concerned.
A lifetime is no time at all in the cloud…
Microsoft quietly announced the move last week before it was spotted by veteran Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley.
“In 2017, we introduced Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for simplifying Kubernetes management, deployment, and operations,” the firm said. “Because it fully replaces Azure Container Service (ACS) capabilities for Kubernetes, ACS will be retired as a standalone service on January 31, 2020,”
Users are warned that the ACS APIs will be blocked as of that day, and they’ll no longer be able to create, update or scale clusters – though they will be able to list and delete existing clusters. Existing clusters should still work, says Microsoft, but will be stricly customers’ responsibility.
Meanwhile, the acs-engine project has been “deprecated”, with the Kubernetes portion is being shift to a new project, aks-engine.
Ironically, the announcement came as Microsoft and Docker were announcing a tie-up on Cloud Native Bundles at DockerCon Europe.