Azure at KubeCon India 2025 | Hyderabad, India – 6-7 August 2025

Welcome to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025! We’re thrilled to join this year’s event in Hyderabad as a Gold sponsor, where we’ll be highlighting the newest innovations in Azure and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) while connecting with India’s dynamic cloud-native community. We’re excited to share some powerful new AKS capabilities that bring AI innovation to the forefront, strengthen security and networking, and make it easier than ever to scale and streamline operations.

Innovate with AI

AI is increasingly central to modern applications and competitive innovation, and AKS is evolving to support intelligent agents more natively. The AKS Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, now in public preview, introduces a unified interface that abstracts Kubernetes and Azure APIs, allowing AI agents to manage clusters more easily across environments. This simplifies diagnostics and operations—even across multiple clusters—and is fully open-source, making it easier to integrate AI-driven tools into Kubernetes workflows.

Enhance networking capabilities

Networking is foundational to application performance and security. This wave of AKS improvements delivers more control, simplicity, and scalability in networking:

• Traffic between AKS services can now be filtered by HTTP methods, paths, and hostnames using Layer-7 network policies, enabling precise control and stronger zero-trust security.
• Built-in HTTP proxy management simplifies cluster-wide proxy configuration and allows easy disabling of proxies, reducing misconfigurations while preserving future settings.
• Private AKS clusters can be accessed securely through Azure Bastion integration, eliminating the need for VPNs or public endpoints by tunneling directly with kubectl.
• DNS performance and resilience are improved with LocalDNS for AKS, which enables pods to resolve names even during upstream DNS outages, with no changes to workloads.
• Outbound traffic from AKS can now use static egress IP prefixes, ensuring predictable IPs for compliance and smoother integration with external systems.
• Cluster scalability is enhanced by supporting multiple Standard Load Balancers, allowing traffic isolation and avoiding rule limits by assigning SLBs to specific node pools or services.
• Network troubleshooting is streamlined with Azure Virtual Network Verifier, which runs connectivity tests from AKS to external endpoints and identifies misconfigured firewalls or routes.

Strengthen security posture

Security remains a foundational priority for Kubernetes environments, especially as workloads scale and diversify. The following enhancements strengthen protection for data, infrastructure, and applications running in AKS—addressing key concerns around isolation, encryption, and visibility.

• Confidential VMs for Azure Linux enable containers to run on hardware-encrypted, isolated VMs using AMD SEV-SNP, providing data-in-use protection for sensitive workloads without requiring code changes.
• Confidential VMs for Ubuntu 24.04 combine AKS’s managed Kubernetes with memory encryption and VM-level isolation, offering enhanced security for Linux containers in Ubuntu-based clusters.
• Encryption in transit for NFS secures data between AKS pods and Azure Files NFS volumes using TLS 1.3, protecting sensitive information without modifying applications.
• Web Application Firewall for Containers adds OWASP rule-based protection to containerized web apps via Azure Application Gateway, blocking common exploits without separate WAF appliances.
• The AKS Security Dashboard in Azure Portal centralizes visibility into vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, compliance gaps, and runtime threats, simplifying cluster security management through Defender for Cloud.

Simplify and scale operations

To streamline operations at scale, AKS is introducing new capabilities that automate resource provisioning, enforce deployment best practices, and simplify multi-tenant management—making it easier to maintain performance and consistency across complex environments.

• Node Auto-Provisioning improves resource efficiency by automatically adding and removing standalone nodes based on pod demand, eliminating the need for pre-created node pools during traffic spikes.
• Deployment Safeguards help prevent misconfigurations by validating Kubernetes manifests against best practices and optionally enforcing corrections to reduce instability and security risks.
• Managed Namespaces streamline multi-tenant cluster operations by providing a unified view of accessible namespaces across AKS clusters, along with quick access credentials via CLI, API, or Portal.

Maximize performance and visibility

To enhance performance and observability in large-scale environments, AKS is also rolling out infrastructure-level upgrades that improve monitoring capacity and control plane efficiency.

• Prometheus quotas in Azure Monitor can now be raised to 20 million samples per minute or active time series, ensuring full metric coverage for massive AKS deployments.
• Control plane performance has been improved with a backported Kubernetes enhancement (KEP-5116), reducing API server memory usage by ~10× during large listings and enabling faster kubectl responses with lower risk of OOM issues in AKS versions 1.31.9 and above.

Microsoft is at KubeCon India 2025 - come say hi!

Connect with us in Hyderabad! Microsoft has a strong on-site presence at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025. Here are some highlights of how you can connect with us at the event:

• August 6-7: Visit Microsoft at Booth G4 for live demos and expert Q&A throughout the conference. Microsoft engineers are also delivering several breakout sessions on AKS and cloud-native technologies.
• Microsoft Sessions: Throughout the conference, Microsoft engineers are speaking in various sessions, including:  

   

  • Keynote: The Last Mile Problem: Why AI Won’t Replace You (Yet)

  • Lightning Talk: Optimizing SNAT Port and IP Address Management in Kubernetes

  • Smart Capacity-Aware Volume Provisioning for LVM Local Storage Across Multi-Cluster Kubernetes Fleet

  • Minimal OS, Maximum Impact: Journey To a Flatcar Maintainer

We’re thrilled to connect with you at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025. Whether you attend sessions, drop by our booth, or watch the keynote, we look forward to discussing these announcements and hearing your thoughts. Thank you for being part of the community, and happy KubeCon! 👋