Microsoft to stop supporting its Azure Container Service in January 2020

Microsoft will cease supporting its Azure Container Service (ACS) as of January 31, 2020, officials revealed last week. ACS is being replaced by Microsoft's dedicated Azure Container Service for Kubernetes (AKS), which the company introduced in 2017.

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Microsoft's ACS for developing, deploying and maintaining containers has supported Kubernetes -- an open-source container-orchestration standard -- since early 2017.

Because of Kubernetes' success, Microsoft added a dedicated Kubernetes container service, AKS, in the Fall of 2017. At the time Microsoft introduced AKS, officials said they planned to continue to offer ACS, originally introduced in 2015. In March 2018, however, Microsoft officials said they would be deprecating ACS at some point, but didn't provide a specific date.

On December 5, Microsoft officials said in a blog post that ACS will no longer be supported as of January 31, 2020. Beginning on that date, all ACS application programming interfaces (APIs) will be blocked. Users will no longer be able to create new clusters, or update or scale existing clusters. They will be able to list and delete existing clusters.

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Microsoft's recommendations for existing ACS users are to migrate to AKS or the ask-engine open-source project if they use Kubernetes. If they use ACS with Docker, Microsoft suggests moving to the Basic or Standard/Advanced Docker Enterprise Edition for Azure solution template. If they use ACS with DC/OS, the company is advocating users move to the Mesosphere DC/OS Enterprise or Mesosphere DC/OS Open Source solution template.

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Last week, Microsoft made available a public preview of AKS virtual nodes, which brings together the container-based compute capacity of Azure Container Instances and the Kubernetes API provided by AKS. The combination brings the benefits of serverless computing to the Kubernetes API, Microsoft officials said.

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