Microsoft rolled out the welcome mat for Kubernetes this week. It’s a big step in rounding out the company’s cloud container ecosystem, but the company isn’t stopping there.
This week, the company shared more details on its upcoming Azure Container Registry (ACR) service. On Nov. 16, Microsoft will release a preview of ACR, which will serve as a private registry that customers can use to host and manage Docker-formatted container images.
“Azure Container Registry integrates well with orchestrators hosted in Azure Container Service, including Docker Swarm, DC/OS and Kubernetes,” assured Microsoft in a Nov. 7 announcement on its website. “Users can benefit from using familiar tooling capable of working with the open source Docker Registry v2.”
ACR enables customers to manage images involving any type of container deployment, Microsoft assures. It supports both Windows and Linux container images in same registry, along with open source command-line tools (Docker login, push, etc.).
Customers can also use ACR to help automate their container development, security scanning and testing workflows using Visual Studio Team Services and third-party solutions like TwistLock.
Based in San Francisco, TwistLock is a software startup that adds another layer of security to container applications. Taking things a step further than technologies like Docker Notary, Twistlock’s Container Security Suite analyses changes in the runtime environment to detect potential vulnerabilities and help harden containerized apps.
This summer, the company raised $10 million in a Series A round of financing led by TenEleven Ventures and backed by YL Ventures and Rally Ventures. Earlier this week, the company announced Twistlock 1.6 featuring a Runtime Radar, which visually indicates how container images interact with one another.
Elsewhere in Microsoft’s growing cloud services portfolio, the company recently announced that Azure Search is now available in Canada. The “search-as-a-service” allows customers to add advanced search capabilities to their mobile and web applications. Also available to Canadian customers is Azure IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) Backup, a data-protection product that enables customers to store backups of their Windows servers and client systems and applications, including Exchange and SQL Server.
On Nov. 8, Microsoft announced that five more of its cloud services adhere to the U.S. federal government strict security standards, for a total of 18 Azure Government solutions that adhere to the FedRAMP High baseline. The newcomers include Azure Backup, Notification Hubs, Service Bus, Site Recovery and the company’s StorSimple hybrid cloud storage product.
Azure DocumentDB, Microsoft’s NoSQL cloud database solution, gains a new guided “quick start” experience that generates a personalized, working sample app for new DocumentDB account in mere seconds. Customers can also now restore their DocumentDB databases and collections by contacting Azure support (DocumentDB data is automatically replicated and backed up at regular intervals).
In a security-enhancing move, Microsoft added firewall rules and IP filtering support to DocumentDB, enabling customers to restrict traffic to select IP addresses and ranges. Finally, the solution now supports Polygon and LineString objects for geospatial indexing and querying. Both objects are commonly used to enable geo-fencing capabilities in mobile, telematics and Internet of Things applications.