Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ensures that vendors all adhere to
a standard that enables container portability and conformance across their
platforms. However, the choice of using a managed container service or bring-
ing in your own CaaS does have an impact on ongoing operations, service man-
agement and integration with existing systems.
In this article we explore some of the leading CaaS solutions available, and
compare those with the public cloud managed container services.
Managed Container Services
Azure Container Service
Microsoft’s initial efforts to simplify container deployments via Azure Con-
tainer Service (ACS), providing the ability to deploy the orchestrator of choice
(K8s, Docker Swarm or Mesosphere DC/OS), was not as successful as antici-
pated. Additionally, with individual vendors (Docker, Mesosphere, Red Hat)
offering their own up-to-date templates to ease the deployment of their plat-
forms, ACS delivered few new user benefits.
Housing one of the founders of Kubernetes, Brendan Burns, Microsoft decided
to re-steer their efforts and provide a Google-Cloud-like managed Kubernetes
experience. As a result, Microsoft released two standalone offerings, the
above-mentioned AKS and Azure Container Instances (ACI). AKS provides a
managed Kubernetes environment, with organizations only responsible for
managing their worker nodes, while ACI provides a serverless approach to
deploying containers.
AKS makes it quick and easy to deploy and manage containerized applications
without requiring expertise in deploying Kubernetes; it even eliminates the
need for updating, patching and maintaining the Kubernetes control plane.
Additionally, for those who are not interested in managing a Kubernetes envi-
ronment, Microsoft also released a “fire up and forget” container solution, ACI,
allowing users to simply deploy their containers while Azure took care of the
orchestration. Additionally, in order to make these services available on-prem-
ises, Microsoft has launched a preview of AKS on Azure Stack (Microsoft’s
on-premises extension of Azure), henceforth enabling a hybrid architecture.
Secondly, Microsoft also released a fully managed OpenShift offering, jointly
engineered, operated and supported by both Red Hat and Microsoft. But the
success of this platform has yet to be seen.
Azure’s updated container solution builds upon some of the lessons learned
from previous failed attempts via Azure Container Service (ACS). In light of all
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