Azure Container Services Episode Summary

Thanks for attending. Following is a summary of the topics we discussed in the second episode:

1. Microservice architecture provides great benefits but also comes with some new challenges like eventual consistency, operational complexity, cascading failures etc. In this episode, the focus was on addressing the operational complexity.
2. Deployments, density, upgrades and monitoring are some of the major operational changes associated with microservices at scale.
3. Docker containers provide one of the best option for addressing the density and deployment challenges. Docker containers can share Docker images and Docker images can share Docker image layers. This allow for higher density as compared to microservices deployed on virtual machines. Containers encapsulate application deployment files, application servers, libraries and files structures required for deployment. This allows build once, run anywhere and run quickly.
4. Docker image is the new deployment file. Developers build and push an image to a registry. Operators pull the image, supply environment specific values and deploy the image to higher environments. Azure container registry service provides private registry capabilities for Docker images.
5. Azure container service(ACS) is a container PaaS service that provides clustering, scheduling, load balancing and scaling for container environments. ACS supports Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and DC/OS clustering/scheduling tools.
6. Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and DC/OS support Docker container format. The same Docker image can be used to start containers in all the three.
7. ACS does not change any of the native APIs provided by Docker Swarm, Kubernetes or DC/OS.
8. Though all the three support Docker container format they all have their own APIs and deployment descriptors.
9. In addition to containers DC/OS also supports long running stateful workloads like Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, Cassandra etc.
10. Operational management suite(OMS) provide the capabilities to monitor containers. OMS also provides log querying capabilities for analysis.
11. Visual studio team service provides capabilities for continuous delivery and continuous deployment for your container applications.

Please register for the next Episode. In this episode we will talk about PCF on Azure: https://aka.ms/d2d2017 

Please join me in the next weeks hands-on ACS workshop in the Houston MTC office: https://aka.ms/con323