Azure Container Service vs boot2docker: What are the differences?

Azure Container Service: Deploy and manage containers using the tools you choose. Azure Container Service optimizes the configuration of popular open source tools and technologies specifically for Azure. You get an open solution that offers portability for both your containers and your application configuration. You select the size, the number of hosts, and choice of orchestrator tools, and Container Service handles everything else; boot2docker: Lightweight Linux for Docker. boot2docker is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Tiny Core Linux made specifically to run Docker containers. It runs completely from RAM, weighs ~27MB and boots in ~5s (YMMV).

Azure Container Service belongs to "Containers as a Service" category of the tech stack, while boot2docker can be primarily classified under "Virtual Machine Management".

Some of the features offered by Azure Container Service are:

• Create a container hosting solution optimized for Azure
• Scale and orchestrate applications using Apache Mesos or Docker Swarm
• Use popular open source, client-side tooling

On the other hand, boot2docker provides the following key features:

• Kernel 3.14.1 with AUFS, Docker 0.10.1, LXC 0.8.0
• Container persistence via disk automount on /var/lib/docker
• SSH keys persistence via disk automount

"Easy to setup, very agnostic" is the top reason why over 3 developers like Azure Container Service, while over 42 developers mention "Lightweight" as the leading cause for choosing boot2docker.

boot2docker is an open source tool with 7.99K GitHub stars and 1.14K GitHub forks. Here's a link to boot2docker's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, boot2docker has a broader approval, being mentioned in 70 company stacks & 30 developers stacks; compared to Azure Container Service, which is listed in 8 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.