Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) – The best place to host your containers

Microsoft today at Build 2018 announced that they will rename Azure Container Service (AKS) to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) manages your hosted Kubernetes environment, making it quick and easy to deploy and manage containerized applications without container orchestration expertise. It also eliminates the burden of ongoing operations and maintenance by provisioning, upgrading, and scaling resources on demand, without taking your applications offline.

• Drastically simplifies how you build and run container-based solutions without deep Kubernetes expertise
• Auto Update, auto scale
• New capabilities integrated with dev tools and workspaces, CI/CD networking, monitoring tools, etc.
• All included in the Azure Portal

This will be a great services to run containerized workloads in a very simple manor and reduce management overhead.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) will also be available on Azure Stack, as announced in the Azure Stack Roadmap update a couple of months ago.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Azure Stack
Managed Kubernetes with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Azure Stack will make it even easier for Azure Stack users to manage and operate Kubernetes environments in the same ways as they do in Azure, without sacrificing portability. This new service features an Azure-hosted control plane, automated upgrades, self-healing, easy scaling, and a simple user experience for both developers and cluster operators. With Container Service, customers get the benefit of open source Kubernetes without complexity and operational overhead. This update applies primarily to Azure Stack users.

With AKS on Azure and Azure Stack. and other services like the Azure Container Registry, Docker for Windows, Windows Server and Hyper-V Containers, Visual Studio Team Services Integration for Azure and Containers, the Microsoft container story becomes very strong. It allows you to run your container workloads in a very simple CI/CD pipeline (VSTS), deployment on Managed Kubernetes (AKS) and deploy it where ever you need it, in the public cloud (Azure) or on-premise (Azure Stack).

Yes Microsoft still has ACS (Azure Container Service), which allows you to deploy different pre-configured container environments and orchestrators, like Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, DC/OS, for scalable deployments and management of containerized workloads.