Microsoft today announced major changes to its Xbox Store infrastructure across consoles, PCs, mobile devices and Xbox cloud games.
In a blog post, Microsoft said it is migrating the Xbox Store infrastructure from Azure Service Fabric to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). As part of this process, it has chosen the Linux distribution Mariner as the host operating system. The move is being led by Microsoft’s Creators Platform and Experience (CPE) group.
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 its roadmap is focused on reducing its footprint and improving security and compliance.
Brian Wentz, CPE’s lead software engineer, 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 have scaled to 12k cores on Mariner. Once the transition is complete, Mariner will be the only Linux distribution to support CPE. Looking ahead, we also want to reduce the cost of container-level services and plan to migrate to Mariner base container images within the next 6 months. In the long term, we also plan to use Mariner distroless containers."
Microsoft has previously migrated its PlayFab game backend service to Mariner, which supports more than 2.5 billion player accounts and 5,000 games. the success of the PlayFab migration has given the Xbox Store the backbone to migrate, and officials expect to move all Microsoft game services to Mariner by the end of the year.
