Microsoft to Bring AKS Service to HCI Platforms
Microsoft this week at its online Ignite 2020 conference unveiled a series of updates to its portfolio of Kubernetes-based offerings, including a preview of an instance of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) on Azure Stack Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI).
In addition, Microsoft announced the preview of a start/stop cluster feature that will be added to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and announced the general availability of an Azure Policy add-on for AKS, which makes it possible to audit and enforce policies across Kubernetes clusters.
Microsoft is also making generally available Bridge to Kubernetes extensions for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code that allow teams to develop against microservices within a running AKS cluster to enable debugging existing services without having to reconfigure or deploy a new cluster.
Brendan Burns, corporate vice president for Azure Compute at Microsoft, told conference attendees AKS on Azure Stack HCI will make it possible to run the same instances of Kubernetes on any server that Microsoft manages of behalf of developer teams in the cloud. The goal is to provide IT organizations with a consistent implementation of Kubernetes based on the same version of Kubernetes that can run anywhere, he said.
Many IT teams are already struggling with trying to manage “snowflake” implementations of Kubernetes clusters running different distributions and versions of Kubernetes, Burns said, noting Microsoft eliminates that issue by taking on all the “heavy lifting” involved with deploying, managing and governing Kubernetes clusters. Most of that heavy lifting will be accomplished via Microsoft Azure Arc, the framework Microsoft rolled out last year to manage hybrid cloud computing environments. Microsoft this week announced the general availability of Azure Arc-enabled servers running both Windows and Linux.
Microsoft enables IT teams to spin up Kubernetes using a graphical user interface (GUI) tool it developed for AKS. Burns said Microsoft expects most organizations will migrate to command-line interfaces (CLIs) in keeping with the best DevOps and GitOps practices Microsoft enables via Azure.
In general, Burns said Kubernetes has reached a level of maturity where companies of all sizes can easily deploy it on a public cloud such as Azure. Kubernetes is not just for “hipster startups,” he said.
Going forward, Kubernetes has reached a level of stability in terms of the application programming interfaces (APIs) being provided such that the focus for the next five years should be building applications on top of it; however, the application development environments for Kubernetes provided today don’t make it easy enough to build applications, Burns said. Microsoft is working toward making it possible for developers using higher levels of abstractions to enable any class of tools, including low-code platforms, to develop and deploy applications on Kubernetes clusters, he noted.
As part of the effort to make it easier to build applications, Burns said he is especially excited about Dapper, an object-relational mapping (ORM) framework that automatically maps an object-oriented domain model to a traditional relational database.
It’s not clear to what degree IT organizations will rely on cloud service providers such as Microsoft to manage their Kubernetes clusters. However, given the complexity of those environments and a general shortage of Kubernetes skills, it’s probable a lot more organizations will rely on managed services a lot more than they do today to manage their existing platforms.
