At AzureCon today, Microsoft will announce the new Azure Container Service in collaboration with Mesosphere, powered by open source components from Apache Mesos and the Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS). The service will be available on Azure later this year.

Azure Container Service makes it easy for customers to deploy a highly-scalable, production-grade container cluster on Azure, using the same underlying Mesos technology that runs Twitter and Apple Siri and serves as the foundation of Mesosphere's Datacenter Operating System (DCOS). Mesos-based systems have proven capable of launching tens of thousands of containers and running across thousands of nodes.

Azure Container Service combines the proven scalability of Apache Mesos and Mesosphere DCOS with Azure's hyper-scale and enterprise-grade cloud. Now systems administrators and developers can create and manage container clusters that span multiple Azure hosts and then orchestrate Docker applications and deploy other containerized services, including services like Spark and Cassandra.

How Mesosphere Fits into the Azure Container Service

Azure Container Service is a managed Azure Service, backed by Microsoft's infrastructure, operations and support teams. It is built with proven open source technology—the same technology that underpins Mesosphere's DCOS, including Apache Mesos and Mesosphere's Marathon. It leverages a rich open source community of developers, which includes dedicated engineers from both Microsoft and Mesosphere.

The Azure Container Service builds upon the partnership between Microsoft and Mesosphere that was first unveiled at the Microsoft //Build conference April 29 of this year, where Azure CTO Mark Russinovich used Mesosphere's DCOS to demonstrate containers at scale on Azure.

To deliver the best possible customer experience, Mesosphere and Microsoft selected open source components from the Mesos and Mesosphere DCOS, including:

Apache Mesos, the distributed systems kernel at the heart of DCOS, co-created at UC Berkeley by Mesosphere co-founder Benjamin Hindman;

Mesosphere Marathon for launching and scaling container based applications;

Mesos-DNS, the service discovery system created by Mesosphere;

Chronos, the distributed cron system for cluster-wide ETL and batch workloads, originally developed at Airbnb by Mesosphere co-founder Florian Leibert;

Docker Containerizer, which has been natively integrated into Mesos since 2014, runs Docker applications

Mesosphere and Microsoft have also developed tools to integrate with Docker Swarm and Docker Compose.

By using open source components in the Azure Container Service, Microsoft has ensured customers can leverage additional Mesosphere tools, such as the DCOS Command Line to install other services on the same cluster, including:

Running Docker at Scale

Mesosphere has been a partner with Docker and has supported Docker at scale as part of Mesos and the Mesosphere DCOS since 2014. Docker fulfills the promise of easily building and packaging applications so they will run anywhere, and Mesosphere makes it possible for devops and operators to run Docker containers at scale in production.

Mesosphere built Docker support natively into Mesos, and we have also added Docker support to Marathon and Chronos. Additionally, we're supporting other Docker-based orchestration tools, including Docker Swarm and Kubernetes.

A Unified Container Vision: Linux and Windows

Microsoft is advancing a vision for containers, one that we at Mesosphere support. Linux and Windows Server are the two most popular server operating systems in the world and enterprises have been asking for a way to unify their workloads across these diverse systems, in the cloud and on premises. In our shared vision, both Linux and Windows containers will be able to run on the same cluster, essentially turning clusters into "one big machine" that can run heterogeneous workloads that use both Windows and Linux, enabling you to pick technology that's the best fit.

To read more on the Azure Container Service, see the Microsoft Azure Blog.