On 5th December 2018, Microsoft announced that it would end the Azure Container Service on 31st January 2020 for all businesses and enterprises.
Retirement of Microsoft’s Azure Container Service
Microsoft’s Azure Container Service (ACS), a key player in the container orchestration world, has reached the end of its journey with its official retirement. Once a popular choice for deploying containerised applications, this service has been succeeded by more advanced and versatile options, leading to its phase-out.
Understanding Azure Container Service
Azure Container Service was designed to simplify creating, configuring, and managing a cluster of preconfigured virtual machines to run containerised applications. Using ACS, organisations could leverage the power of popular open-source tools like DC/OS, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes for managing and scaling applications.
Why Did Microsoft Retire Azure Container Service?
- Evolution of Container Technology: The container orchestration landscape has evolved rapidly. Newer services offer more features, better scalability, and improved reliability compared to what ACS was initially designed to provide.
- Kubernetes Emergence: Kubernetes has emerged as the industry standard for container orchestration. Microsoft’s integration of Kubernetes into Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) provided a more robust, scalable, and feature-rich platform than ACS.
- Customer Feedback and Trends: The decision also aligns with feedback from the user community and industry trends, pushing for more integrated, efficient, and secure container orchestration solutions.
Transition to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
With the retirement of ACS, Microsoft has significantly emphasised Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) as its core container orchestration service. AKS offers several advantages:
- Enhanced Scalability and Reliability: AKS provides superior scalability and reliability for containerised applications, meeting the demands of modern app development.
- Integrated Developer Experience: It offers an integrated experience for developers, with tools for CI/CD, monitoring, and security.
- Community and Microsoft Support: AKS benefits from strong community support for Kubernetes, along with Microsoft’s expertise and support structure.
What Does This Mean for Current ACS Users?
Existing ACS users are encouraged to transition to AKS. Microsoft has provided guidance and tools to facilitate this migration, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal disruption. The shift aligns users with the latest container orchestration and opens new avenues for innovation and scalability.
Microsoft officially launched the Azure Container Service in 2016 to support Docker container images, so containerised applications become portable across cloud and on-premises environments.
Microsoft built the Azure Container Service on a fully open-source platform to maximise the portability of workloads and to provide a choice among popular orchestration engines like DC/OS or Docker Swarm, based on the Mesosphere Datacentre Operating System product. But now Microsoft will ultimately end ACS on 31 January 2020.
In this article, we will discuss how retirement for ACS will affect you and what is the best alternative for it.
Effect of Retirement of ACS
From 31st January 2020, all the ACS APIs will be blocked, which means you will no longer have access to creating new clusters or updating or scaling existing groups using the portal, CLI or Resource Manager templates.
However, it will still allow you to list and delete existing clusters with the help of client tools. Also, the existing groups and applications relying on them would continue to work even after the retirement of the ACS, i.e., 31st January 2020. Still, there will be no technical support or feature improvements from Microsoft.
Apart from ACS APIs, the acs-engine project that created unmanaged container orchestrator clusters will also stop receiving updates; it has been denigrated and is no longer in active development.
What are the best alternatives to ACS?
Microsoft might end the ACS, but it has already provided a great alternative: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Microsoft introduced AKS in 2017 to simplify Kubernetes management, deployment, and operations. We can say that Microsoft has replaced ACS with AKS.
Not only that but the ACS-engine project has also been replaced by a new repo – aks-engine, which will continue the open-source work backing Kubernetes on Azure. Thus, the clusters deployed via acs-engine will continue to run, as the aks-engine will provide backward compatibility for scaling and upgrading operations. However, for new groups, you will have to move to aks-engine.
So, individuals relying on Azure Container Service can now migrate to AKS before 31st January 2020. Since the announcement of the retirement of ACS, Microsoft has been encouraging users to migrate to AKS by providing the below feature enhancements:
- AKS provides a simplified deployment of managed Kubernetes clusters in Azure
- It will reduce the complexity and operational overhead for Kubernetes management
- It will be able to handle the monitoring and maintenance of critical tasks like health
Coming to the migration part, there are three recommendations by Microsoft based on your ACS usages, which include:
- You can migrate to Azure Kubernetes Service or the open-source project – aks-engine if you use ACS with Kubernetes.
- Migrate to the Basic or Standard/Advanced Docker Enterprise Edition for Azure solution template if you use ACS with Docker can.
- Users using ACS with DC/OS can migrate to Mesosphere DC/OS Enterprise or Mesosphere DC/OS Open Source solution template.
You can leverage these solutions to migrate from Azure Container Service before retirement.
Conclusion
The retirement of Azure Container Service marks the end of an era but also reflects the natural progression of technology. As Microsoft continues to invest in Azure Kubernetes Service, users can look forward to a more integrated, efficient, and scalable container orchestration platform. This shift indicates Microsoft’s commitment to staying at the forefront of cloud and container technologies, addressing the evolving needs of developers and businesses alike.
Azure Container Service has always been a great advantage for businesses and enterprises. With its retirement, some organisations might survive managing their clusters. However, if you migrate to AKS before the retirement of ACS, then you might not face any issues in running your clusters continuously. In this article, we talked about the effect of the retirement of ACS on businesses and the benefits of migrating to AKS from ACS.
Contact Server Consultancy, a Leading IT Support company and Microsoft Azure Experts in London, for more information about Azure Container Service.