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Microsoft today joined its rivals in offering customers a cloud-based container registry for their Docker container images.
Azure Container Registry is now generally available, the company announced today. The service, available in preview since November 2016, serves as a cloud-based repository that enables customers to store and manage private Docker container images.
“Azure Container Registry integrates well with orchestrators hosted in Azure Container Service, including Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and DC/OS as well as other Azure Services including Service Fabric and Azure App Services,” assured Steve Lasker, program manager of Azure Developer Experiences at Microsoft, in an April 7 announcement. “Customers can benefit from using familiar tooling capable of working with the open source Docker Registry v2.”
New features include repository, tag and manifest listings in the Azure Portal management hub and support for Azure CLI (command line interface) 2.0. The service also supports nested level repositories and features a dual-password key rotation scheme, added Lasker.
Azure Container Registry is available worldwide across 23 regions, with more to come. The complete list of supported regions can be found in this blog post
Among the “big three” cloud providers, Microsoft is a relative newcomer to the container registry scene.
Quick to jump on the Docker bandwagon, Google released Container Registry, a secure Docker repository hosting service for its Cloud Platform in January 2015. Amazon Web Services launched a similar service called EC2 Container Registry in December 2015.
Also this week, Microsoft released a preview of Azure Services, a suite of platform as a service (PaaS) offerings, for the Azure Stack hybrid-cloud computing solution. Azure Stack, available later this year as server hardware and software bundles from Cisco, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo, enables customers to run Azure software in their own data centers.
The preview includes Azure App Service for mobile and web applications, the Azure Functions serverless event processing offering and updates to the SQL and MySQL database services. App Service now supports deployment on ADFS-authenticated (Active Directory Federation Services) Azure Stack implementations and environments that are completely disconnected from the cloud.
Microsoft’s cloud-based big data processing platform, Azure HDInsight, was officially updated to version 3.6 this week. It includes support for Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) 2.6, Apache Spark 2.1 and Apache Hive 2.1, the latter of which offers a twofold increase in ETL (extract, transform and load) performance, according to the company.
In addition, Azure HDInsight 3.6 offers a new web tool that helps developers get their big data projects off the ground.
“This release also includes new Hive views (Hive View 2.0) which provides an easy to use graphical user interface for developers to get started with Hadoop,” blogged Pranav Rastogi , a Microsoft Azure, Big Data and Open Source Analytics program manager. “Developers can use this to easily upload data to HDInsight, define tables, write queries and get insights from data faster using [Hive View 2.0].”