Container Platforms in Azure
One of the fundamental building blocks for microservice architecture style is the platform. Today, container platforms provide one of the best options for running microservices. There are many platforms available that can be used to run microservice . The unique value proposition of Azure is openness, inclusivity and availability of all the popular platforms in one public cloud. The following is a brief overview of the container platforms available in Azure.
Azure Container Service(ACS)
ACS provides a container hosting environment on top on Azure infrastructure services by using the most popular open-source tools and technologies. Today Docker containers, orchestrated with either Docker Swarm or DC/OS or Kubernetes are supported. Additionally, Azure also provides container registry service along with ability to monitor applications and containers with OMS and Application Insights. ACS is container aware but not application aware. Hence I would categorize ACS as “container PaaS”.
RedHat OpenShift
OpenShift is built on top of Docker containers and Kubernetes. OpenShift further adds developer and management capabilities. One of the key capabilities being JBoss xPaaS, containerized images of JBoss middleware that are designed to be used with OpenShift. I would categorize OpenShift as “application conatiner PaaS” as it provides middleware services for running applications.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF)
PCF is built on top of Garden containers and Diego architecture. The current version of PCF can run Docker containers as well. PCF provides many application services including core microservice design patterns like service discovery, client side load balancing, circuit breakers etc. via Spring Cloud. The recent release of Ops Manager for Azure and integration of Azure data services via service bindings makes Azure a great destination for PCF . PCF provides a rich set of application services and patterns. Hence I would categorize PCF as “application container PaaS”.
Azure Service fabric
Azure Service Fabric has been built ground up for powering micros service applications. The key difference between Service Fabric and platforms like PCF and OpenShift is Service Fabric’s native support for implementing stateful services and actors. While the previously mentioned platforms take the approach of a stateless application tier with state deferred to an external store such as database, cache, file system etc. Service fabric makes stateful services first class citizens and goes a step beyond by providing an application framework implementing virtual actor pattern. I would categories Service Fabric as “application container PaaS +” as it offers application frameworks natively integrated with the runtime.