Docker and Apache Mesos come together under Azure's spell

Microsoft is ready to debut its Azure Container Service that will make is simple for customers to run Docker and Apache Mesos containers in its Azure cloud.

First reported by ZDNet, the solution was unveiled during the AzureCon event taking place this week and the hope is that it will eventually give developers the chance to scale up their apps to thousands of containers.

The idea of the Azure Container Service is to give developers the opportunity to use the container scheduling and orchestration service to deploy and configure apps using both the Apache Mesos cluster management solution and Docker's expert container management product.

Mesosphere's Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) allows users to manage virtualised and non-virtualised data centres in a way that makes them appear like one large machine. This is done by creating one elastic pool of resources that apps can draw upon.

The software is built on the open source Apache Mesos cluster manager and it supports a huge range of different workloads on the same cluster including Hadoop, Google Kubernetes, Marathon and many more.

Linux is first up

Docker, meanwhile, is also an open source offering that automatically drives app deployment and of course uses containers instead of virtual machines to allow multiple apps to be run on the same server regardless of the OS.

The Azure Container Service will handle Linux containers from the outset and eventually support Windows Server containers. As for a release date, it's expected that a preview will be out before the end of the year.

• Docker on Windows Server: how will it work?