Microsoft today announced that its Xbox store infrastructure will undergo major changes, covering consoles, PCs, mobile devices, and Xbox cloud games.
In a blog post, Microsoft said it is migrating its Xbox store infrastructure from Azure Service Fabric to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). As part of this process, it chose the Linux distribution Mariner as the host operating system. The move is being led by Microsoft’s Creator Platform and Experience (CPE) group.
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CBL-Mariner is an open-source Linux distribution developed by Microsoft to support various cloud services on Azure. It is the base container image for Azure services and provides support for graphical components such as Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) and Azure Sphere OS.
Microsoft said it chose Mariner because of its roadmap focused on reducing its footprint and improving security and compliance. Brian Wentz, Principal Software Engineer at CPE, also noted: that CPE is in the final stages of migrating from Service Fabric to AKS, and as part of the transition, we chose to migrate to Mariner as our host OS. In less than a month we scaled to 12k cores on Mariner. Once the transition is complete, Mariner will be the only Linux distribution that supports CPE.
Going forward, we also hope to reduce the cost of serving at the container level and plan to migrate to the Mariner base container image within the next 6 months. In the long term, we also plan to use Mariner distroless containers.
Microsoft has previously migrated the PlayFab game backend service to Mariner, which supports more than 2.5 billion player accounts and 5,000 games. The success of PlayFab’s migration gave the Xbox store the confidence to migrate, and officials expect to migrate all Microsoft game services to Mariner by the end of the year.
