Build resilient applications with Kubernetes on Azure

Welcome to KubeCon EU 2020, the virtual edition. While we won’t be able to see each other in person at KubeCon EU this year, we're excited that this new virtual format of KubeCon will make the conference more accessible than ever, with more people from the amazing Kubernetes community able to join and participate from around the world without leaving their homes.

With everything that has been happening, the last year has been an up and down experience, but through it all I’m incredibly proud of the focus and dedication from the Azure Kubernetes team. They have continued to iterate and improve our Kubernetes on Azure that provides enterprise-grade experience for our customers.

Kubernetes on Azure (and indeed anywhere) delivers an open and portable ecosystem for cloud-native development. In addition to this core promise, we also deliver a unique enterprise-grade experience that ensures the reliability and security your workloads demand, while also enabling the agility and efficiency that business today desires. You can securely deploy any workload to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to drive cost-savings at scale across your business. Today, we're going to tell you about even more capabilities that can help you along on your cloud-native journey to Kubernetes on Azure.

Improving latency and operational efficiency

One of the key drivers of cloud adoption is reducing latency. It used to be that it took days to get physical computers and set them up in a cluster. Today, you can deploy a Kubernetes cluster on Azure in less than five minutes. These improvements benefit the agility of our customers. For customers who want to scale and provision faster, we are announcing a preview of ephemeral OS disk support which makes responding to new compute demands on your cluster even faster.

Latency isn’t just about the length of time to create a cluster. It’s also about how fast you can detect and respond to operational problems. To help enterprises improve their operational efficiency, we’re announcing preview integration with Azure Resource Health which can alert you if your cluster is unhealthy for any reason. We’re also announcing the general availability of node image updates which allow you to upgrade the underlying operating system to respond to bugs or vulnerabilities in your cluster while staying on the same Kubernetes version for stability.

Finally, though Kubernetes has always enabled enterprises to drive cost savings through containerization, the new economic realities of the world during a pandemic mean that achieving cost efficiency for your business is more important than ever. We’ve got a great exercise that can help you learn how to optimize your costs using containers and the Azure Kubernetes Service.

Secure by design with Kubernetes on Azure

One of the key pillars of any enterprise computing platform is security. With market-leading features like policy integration and Azure Active Directory identity for Pods and cloud-native security have always been an important part of the Azure Kubernetes Service. I’m excited about some new features we’ve added recently to further enhance the security of your workloads running on Kubernetes.

Though Kubernetes has built-in support for secrets, most enterprise environments require a more secure and more compliant implementation. In the Azure Kubernetes Service, being enterprise-grade means providing integration between Azure Key Vault and the Azure Kubernetes service. Using Key Vault with Kubernetes enables you to securely store your credentials, certificates, and other secrets in state of the art, compliant secret store, and easily use them with your applications in an Azure Kubernetes cluster.

It’s even more exciting that this integration is built on the back of an open Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver that the Azure team built and open sourced for the entire Kubernetes community. Giving back to open source is an important part of what it means to be a community steward, and it was exciting to see our approach get validated as it was picked up and used by the HashiCorp Vault team for their secrets integration. Our open source team has been hard at work on improving many other parts of the security ecosystem. We’ve enhanced the CSI driver for Windows, and worked on cgroups v2 and containerd. If you want to learn more about how to secure your cloud-native workloads and make sure that your enterprise is following Microsoft’s best practices, check out our guide to Kubernetes best practices. They will teach you how to integrate firewalls, policy, and more to ensure you have both security and agility in your cloud-native development.