Microsoft will launch Azure Container Registry preview on November 14

Microsoft is announcing today a few updates to its Azure public cloud lineup. Most significantly, the company is introducing a new Azure Container Registry service that will let developers host container images for applications they want to run on the Azure infrastructure. Containers are lightweight alternatives to virtual machines (VMs) that have become popular in the past few years.

The service will become available in preview on November 14, Corey Sanders, director of compute for Microsoft Azure, wrote in a blog post.

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“Using the Azure Container Registry, you can store Docker formatted images for all types of container deployments,” Sanders wrote. “Additionally, the Azure Container Registry integrates well with the orchestrator offered by the Azure Container Service. When you use the Azure Container Registry, you will find it compatible with the open source Docker Registry so you can use the same tools on ACR.”

This builds on the Azure Container Service, which does the work of hosting and managing containers in Azure. Other public clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and IBM SoftLayer, have container management services, and all of those three also offer container registries. Now Azure does, too.

With respect to the Azure Container Service, Microsoft is open-sourcing the tool’s underlying engine, Sanders wrote. Additionally, Microsoft is enhancing the service by making it possible for people to use the open-source Kubernetes software as the underlying orchestration tool for containers, instead of using Docker Swarm or Mesosphere’s DCOS.