Azure Container Service in Preview

A new service in preview called Azure Container Service offers developers an approach for rapidly deploying a group of identical Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) as container hosts for container-based applications. The service should appeal to developers who want to deploy Azure applications in Docker containers, an increasingly common server application deployment and management technology. The service is currently in preview and limited to A-series Linux VMs, but it will eventually expand to support containers running on Windows Server VMs in Azure.

Container Fundamentals

Containers allow applications to be quickly installed or upgraded without traditional installers or scripts, and they reduce the impact of one application on other applications. Containers are primarily geared toward managing server applications like Web applications or the MySQL database running on a server, while App-V is generally used for managing Windows desktop applications running on the Windows client OS. Containers deliver isolation and other benefits similar to hardware virtualization technology, such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V, but containers all run in a single session of a single OS environment (OSE). Multiple applications can run securely from a single host, isolated from each other, and each can be deployed and managed individually, taking all of its software prerequisites with it. This requires less hardware and OS management overhead than hardware virtualization, since only the single OS instance needs to be deployed, run, and maintained.