---
title: " Bringing Kubernetes Support to Azure Container Service "
date: 2016-11-07
slug: bringing-kubernetes-support-to-azure
url: /blog/2016/11/Bringing-Kubernetes-Support-To-Azure
author: >
Brendan Burns (Microsoft)
---
With more than a thousand people coming to [KubeCon](http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubecon) in my hometown of Seattle, nearly three years after I helped start the Kubernetes project, it’s amazing and humbling to see what a small group of people and a radical idea have become after three years of hard work from a large and growing community. In July of 2014, scarcely a month after Kubernetes became publicly available, Microsoft announced its initial support for Azure. The release of [Kubernetes 1.4](https://kubernetes.io/blog/2016/09/kubernetes-1-4-making-it-easy-to-run-on-kuberentes-anywhere/), brought support for native Microsoft networking, [load-balancer](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/28821) and [disk integration](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/29836).
Today, Microsoft [announced](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-container-service-the-cloud-s-most-open-option-for-containers/) the next step in Kubernetes on Azure: the introduction of Kubernetes as a supported orchestrator in Azure Container Service (ACS). It’s been really exciting for me to join the ACS team and help build this new addition. The integration of Kubernetes into ACS means that with a few clicks in the Azure portal, or by running a single command in the new python-based Azure command line tool, you will be able to create a fully functional Kubernetes cluster that is integrated with the rest of your Azure resources.
Kubernetes is available in public preview in Azure Container Service today. Community participation has always been an important part of the Kubernetes experience. Over the next few months, I hope you’ll join us and provide your feedback on the experience as we bring it to general availability.
In the spirit of community, we are also excited to announce a new open source project: [ACS Engine](https://github.com/azure/acs-engine). The goal of ACS Engine is to provide an open, community driven location to develop and share best practices for orchestrating containers on Azure. All of our knowledge of running containers in Azure has been captured in that repository, and we look forward to improving and extending it as we move forward with the community. Going forward, the templates in ACS Engine will be the basis for clusters deployed via the ACS API, and thus community driven improvements, features and more will have a natural path into the Azure Container Service. We’re excited to invite you to join us in improving ACS. Prior to the creation of ACS Engine, customers with unique requirements not supported by the ACS API needed to maintain variations on our templates. While these differences start small, they grew larger over time as the mainline template was improved and users also iterated their templates. These differences and drift really impact the ability for users to collaborate, since their templates are all different. Without the ability to share and collaborate, it’s difficult to form a community since every user is siloed in their own variant.