Microsoft AKS

Microsoft escalated an intense battle among cloud providers this week with the introduction of an entirely managed Kubernetes service aimed at saving customers both operational headaches and money.

AKS (Azure Container Service), released in preview, delivers the popular container orchestration technology with a simplified user interface and hosted control plane. Clusters are self-healing and the software automatically upgrades, Brendan Burns, a distinguished engineer at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, said in a webcast presenting the new offering.

AKS builds off Azure's existing ACS (also Azure Container Service) without charging for the new management functionality, said Burns, who previously led efforts to develop Kubernetes when he worked at Google.