I’ve been making fairly heavy use of Kubernetes on Azure of late, and this has been mostly done using ACS Engine to create the clusters. I need to make use of Windows clusters which is not supported in the AKS PaaS service, so I need to create a custom cluster using ACS-Engine.
For those who don’t know, ACS engine is an open source tool, created by Microsoft, that helps generate ARM templates to deploy customer Kubernetes clusters in Azure.
If your looking to run Kubernetes in Azure then the Azure Kubernetes Service is what you’ll generally be looking at, it offers a semi-managed solution with PaaS based management nodes and is by far the simplest and easiest Kubernetes service to use in Azure. If AKS meets all your needs, then no need to read any further, but for some use cases, it may not. AKS is a new service, it’s not gone GA quite yet, and it is still missing some features like the ability to run Windows Containers, support for certain versions of Kubernetes, or maybe you don’t want to run Kubernetes at all and want Swarm or Mesos.
