Microsoft Simplifies Management of Kubernetes Clusters in Azure Cloud

Microsoft this week previewed Automatic, a service that automates the setting up of Kubernetes clusters on the Azure cloud based on the manifests, and an Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager service to automate the placement of application workloads.

Announced at the Microsoft Build 2024 conference, IT teams running Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) will be able to invoke Copilot for Azure to employ generative artificial intelligence (AI) to configure AKS backups, change pricing tiers, locate YAML files for editing and construct kubectl commands.

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There is also now a Service Connector greatly for managing authentication and network configurations, connecting to Azure services, and a node auto-provisioning capability that automatically rightsizes virtual machines for workloads.

Microsoft also promised to add an auto-instrumentation capability that enables Application Insights to make telemetry like metrics, requests and dependencies available in Application Insights service by automatically injecting the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry toolkit into application pods.

A Clear Need to Apply Automation

Nate Ceres, senior product marketing manager for Microsoft, told conference attendees these additions are part of an ongoing effort to reduce the steep learning curve that IT teams encounter when initially adopting Kubernetes clusters. He added that IT professionals with those skills are still too hard to find, so there is a clear need to apply automation to the management of Kubernetes clusters.

In effect, Microsoft is preconfiguring best practices for managing and securing Kubernetes clusters into AKS, said Ceres.

Microsoft, for example, is previewing a deployment safeguards enforcement mode that will either not let a resource be invoked or be automatically fixed per a set of best cybersecurity practices.

In addition, a Kubernetes AI toolchain operator (KAITO), an open-source project that optimizes machine learning workloads, is now also available for AKS.

Microsoft is also making available an instance of the open-source Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaler (KEDA) in the Azure portal. It will next month make generally available a managed Azure Container Storage service for AKS. Microsoft is also previewing updates to Azure Files updates, which promise to make it simpler to protect data.

Microsoft also revealed that a .NET Aspire suite of tools and libraries for setting up, configuring and instrumenting cloud-native applications written in .NET is generally available. Additionally, .NET Aspire provides developers with preconfigured common resiliency patterns and a built-in dashboard to observe interactions across multiple services.

Finally, Microsoft is also generally making available Azure Functions on Azure Container Apps to provide developers with access to serverless computing capabilities. It also extends its implementation of the Dapr runtime framework to add support for Azure Functions.

It’s unclear to what degree IT teams rely on managed cloud services to deploy Kubernetes clusters versus relying on an internal IT team to manage them. However, as the management of those clusters becomes simpler the pace at which cloud-native applications are being deployed should steadily increase. Today the size and expertise of the engineering team needed to manage Kubernetes clusters limits the pace at which organizations can deploy cloud-native applications. However, as the rise of the next generation of automation frameworks infused with AI becomes available, the barrier to Kubernetes adoption is dropping.