Microsoft Adds Bevy of Cloud-Native Services to Azure

At its Build conference this week, Microsoft added a slew of capabilities to make it simpler to build, deploy and manage cloud native applications in its Azure cloud computing service, including a preview of a tool for managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters dubbed Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager.

Long-term support, starting with Kubernetes 1.27, is also being made available for up to two years.

In addition, Microsoft is previewing an Azure Container Apps capability that will make it possible to run smaller executables within complex jobs in parallel alongside core business logic. Azure Container Apps provides access to an application programming interface (API) to launch jobs, schedule them or run them in response to specific events. Microsoft is also previewing a managed Azure Container Apps service based on Kubernetes clusters that can be used to run a range of asynchronous ad hoc tasks.

Developers can now also deploy containerized Azure Functions in Azure Container Apps to build event-driven serverless applications.

Other capabilities include the general availability of a managed monitoring service based on open source Prometheus software that has been integrated into Azure Monitor and a preview of an instance of Prometheus for Kubernetes clusters that are managed via Azure Arc, a framework Microsoft provides for managing instances of platforms based on the Azure software stack.

Also, confidential containers on Azure Container Instances (ACI) based on AMD EPYC processors is now generally available. These confidential containers are also being made available via Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) based on the Kata Confidential Containers open source project, now in preview. The containers can be grouped to run in a hardware-based and attested Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) without the need to adopt a specialized programming model.

In public preview, meanwhile, a managed Microsoft Azure Container Storage service now supports volume snapshots to enable capturing of point-in-time state of the persistent volumes, enabling developers to back up the data before applying changes in addition to providing improved scalability.

Azure Linux as a container host operating system (OS) for AKS is also now generally available. In addition, AKS on Azure Stack HCI and AKS on Windows Server feature the same container host to provide greater consistency and simplified management across the cloud and the network edge.

Finally, Transactable Kubernetes apps, a subset of the Azure Marketplace for deploying applications on AKS is now generally available.

Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) group told conference attendees that Microsoft is committed to providing a highly elastic set of cloud services for building modern applications.

It’s not clear to whether Microsoft is gaining ground in the cloud at the expense of rivals because of the capabilities it provides to build, deploy and secure cloud-native applications. However, it is clear Microsoft continues to provide an increasingly robust set of Azure cloud services. The challenge is not so much determining whether to build and deploy cloud-native applications but, given their inherent complexity, how quickly to do so.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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