Azure Container Service vs Orchard: What are the differences?

Developers describe Azure Container Service as "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. On the other hand, Orchard is detailed as "We host your Docker containers". Use Docker to run anything you can think of in 2 seconds flat without having to setup or manage servers.

Azure Container Service and Orchard can be primarily classified as "Containers as a Service" tools.

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, Orchard provides the following key features:

• Run commands
• Run daemons and databases
• 100% custom environment