Welcome to the CloudAcademy Introduction to Azure Container Service, or ACS, course. This course covers the Azure Container Service, or ACS for short. The Azure Container Service is part of Microsoft's Azure cloud offering, the services used to manage Docker containers at scale in enterprises and production scenarios. It does so by providing infrastructure services for three of the most popular container orchestration systems.

Those three systems include Docker's own Docker Swarm, Meso's DC/OS, or the Data Center Operating System, and Kubernetes.

My name is Jeremy Likness. I'm a consultant and an evangelist, and I've been working in the computer industry for two decades. You can follow me on my Twitter handle that you can see on the screen, you can contact me through the contact form on my blog, and you can also check out open-source projects and tutorials that I post online on my GitHub repo, and that link is available on your screen right now. Who should attend this course?

This course is specifically designed for developers, for operations engineers, really anyone that is part of the DevOps pipeline, and anyone interested in managing containers at scale leveraging one of the orchestration systems that are used by ACS. We will cover the following topics of discussion.

First, I'll give a brief overview of containers and orchestrators and talk about why they exist and what they're useful for. Then, we'll look at the basics of deploying orchestration systems and containers with ACS. We'll go into an overview of the different orchestration options that are available, and we'll talk a little bit about container management in the context of each of those orchestrators.

You will gain the following from this course. An understanding of what Azure Container Service is and why it exists, what it's useful for. You'll have the ability to create and manage virtual machine hosts as clusters for container orchestration using one of the three popular orchestrators that ACS services. You'll have a familiarity with both the portal user interface that you access through your web browser and the Azure Command Line Interface, also known as the CLI. You'll have a knowledge of the proper way to run containers in production on Azure in the cloud using ACS.

And finally, you'll have a basic understanding of how to deploy, scale, and orchestrate containers through ACS leveraging Kubernetes, the Data Center Operating System, and Docker Swarm.

The following are prerequisites for this course. I expect that you have a basic understanding of Docker containers. We'll go through a high-level overview, but you'll need to really understand containers to keep up with the different types of orchestrations that we're working with. I also expect that you're familiar with the Azure Portal. We'll focus specifically on that ACS blade, or the Azure Container Service blade, but you should know your way around the portal and be familiar with Azure. And also, the Azure Command Line Interface. We'll be using that quite a bit to set up our ACS clusters.

Ultimately, this course is about you, so please leave feedback in the comments section of the course landing page. Your feedback helps us make these courses better and address the things that you're looking to see. Thank you.