Azure Container Service will be retired on January 31, 2020, and is no longer recommended for new resources.

Azure Container Service (ACS) provides a way to simplify the creation, configuration, and management of a cluster of virtual machines that are preconfigured to run containerized applications. Using an optimized configuration of popular open-source scheduling and orchestration tools, ACS enables you to use your existing skills or draw upon a large and growing body of community expertise to deploy and manage container-based applications on Microsoft Azure.

ACS leverages Docker images to ensure that your application containers are fully portable. It also supports your choice of Kubernetes, DC/OS (powered by Apache Mesos), or Docker Swarm for orchestration to ensure that these applications can be scaled to thousands, even tens of thousands of containers.

The Azure Container service enables you to take advantage of the enterprise grade features of Azure while still maintaining application portability, including at the orchestration layers.

There are no fees for any of the software installed by default as part of ACS. All default options are implemented by open source software.

ACS is currently available for Standard A, D, DS, G, GS, F, and FS series Linux virtual machines. You are only charged for the compute instances you choose, as well as the other underlying infrastructure resources consumed such as storage and networking. There are no incremental charges for the ACS itself.

Deployment will typically take 15-20 minutes. Once complete, you can access and manage your cluster through an SSH tunnel.