Innovate at scale with cloud-native architectures
Cloud-native is the core of application innovation and modernization. When we talk about cloud-native we are referring to technologies and development patterns that empower organizations to build and run scalable applications, quickly. The speed and agility of cloud native is made possible by some foundational pillars – modern architectures like microservices or composite applications deployed in containers, using an API first approach for your apps, infrastructure, and data, while taking advantage of DevOps and automation, on infrastructure you can count on to be elastic. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) brings all these together making it easier to deploy and manage cloud native applications leading to some great business outcomes and savings for our customers. For example, when the game Forza Horizon 5 launched, it handled 10 million concurrent players — the biggest first week in Xbox Game Studios history. Relativity, a global market leader in legal e-discovery and compliance software, can deploy on the same day as opposed to 6 months. And Elvia, a Norwegian energy company, built a secure DevOps platform to serve the needs of their 2 million customers.
They key tenets of application development experience surround
- Extensive automation
- Scale and resilience
- Consistent experience
- Speed with security
- Simplified "code to cloud"
- Cost optimization
We are continuing to address the common challenges application development like managing distributed clusters, getting actionable telemetry, adding new capabilities to bring sensitive resources into the cloud with confidence and much more, for our customers to do more with less.
With the Microsoft Cloud and Azure, we meet you where you are and make it easy for you to start your cloud-native journey—from anywhere. That means developers can use their favorite languages, open-source frameworks, and tools to code and deploy to the cloud and the edge, collaborating in a secure way and integrating different components with modern solutions.
Supporting all of this, here are some of the latest developments we’ll talk about at Microsoft Ignite this week. You can also view the Drive application innovation and modernization at scale with cloud-native architectures session to learn more about these announcements.
Illustrated guide to driving application innovation and modernization at scale with cloud-native architectures | [Sketchnotes by @nitya]
Kubernetes experience on Azure extends flexibility for cloud-native apps
For users that have hundreds or thousands of AKS clusters, managing the Kubernetes clusters at-scale and orchestrating cross-cluster scenarios can be hard, with many duplicative tasks and a lot of custom configuration required to spread applications across clusters. Today we are excited to announce the public preview of Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager to address these multi-cluster challenges at-scale. You can now create a Kubernetes fleet and join your new and existing AKS clusters as members, and subsequently, use the fleet to centrally operate them. The fleet control plane itself, is a fully managed AKS cluster, abstracting underlying infrastructure upgrades, maintenance or the settings for this cluster from users for this cluster. Furthermore, you can now set up L4 load balancing with endpoints in different clusters and leverage namespace and service alikeness to effectively deploy the same application at scale across clusters and regions. Learn more about what we are planning with Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager over the coming months.
Another key challenge when running at scale is observability and monitoring, and so we’re very happy to announce the Public Preview of the Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus. Prometheus, is the most popular open-source container monitoring technology but self-hosting it can be cumbersome and challenging, requiring for example that you handle scaling, versioning and updating. The new Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus marries the best of the open-source ecosystem with the built-in security, scalability, and high availability from Azure Monitor. Our managed ruler service performs Prometheus-compatible alert and recording rule evaluations and supports PromQL expressions, custom labels, templated annotations and more. Finally, you can leverage your existing Grafana dashboards to visualize the data with Azure Managed Grafana now GA.
Earlier in the year, Satya announced the general availability of confidential virtual machines utilizing 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors. AKS is first to market in enabling AMD SEV-SNP confidential VM node pools in Kubernetes, adding defense-in-depth to Azure's hardened security profile. Organizations can now seamlessly lift-and-shift Linux containers to confidential VM node pools without any code refactoring and minimal performance degradation, while benefiting from AKS’ feature richness. You can get started today in any region that supports confidential SKUs! AKS offers the right balance between flexibility and control. We are thrilled to announce the preview availability of Mariner Linux, as a container host for AKS. Mariner is a fully open-source Linux operating system purpose-built by Microsoft to run container workloads and optimized for AKS. Like Mariner, the breadth of AKS functionality and cloud native tools can be extended and deployed to popular environments and provides organizations with enterprise security capabilities to deploy containers at scale. You can also take advantage of the hybrid deployment options for AKS enabled by Azure Arc to run your containerized applications on-prem and at the edge. You can now deploy and manage AKS on Windows devices, Windows IoT, Windows Server, and Azure Stack HCI all from the Azure Portal.
Self-serve Marketplace for Kubernetes application ecosystem
Most organizations have diverse IT investments because of organic growth and acquisitions. Cloud native applications often don’t get a fresh start and need to be deployed into these complex environments. Whether you need a service mesh for your microservices, or researching an incident, and orchestrating a response across distributed teams, an ecosystem of tools that supports your end-to-end journey is critical. Azure Marketplace provides a variety of technologies for teams to integrate with their app and now we have some exciting updates on how AKS customers can quickly and safely leverage these offerings.
With the goal to provide a rich ecosystem of Kubernetes applications for AKS customers, we are launching Kubernetes apps in preview on Marketplace. Partners can provide vetted solutions, and AKS customers can self-serve Kubernetes apps from their preferred procurement channel in the Marketplace. Users can explore and deploy Kubernetes apps from marketplace with easy one-click deployments and enable lifecycle management of these applications.
Accelerate developer productivity with Serverless in cloud-native environments
Cloud-native applications are typically deployed using DevOps-style development relying on automation for continuous integration and delivery. Azure, GitHub, and the Visual Studio family of developer tools—provide customers with an end-to-end DevOps solution for code to cloud and edge deployments. We’ve all heard about the need to incorporate security checks earlier in the development lifecycle. With GitHub, developers can scan code - as it’s created - to get accurate, actionable security reviews within the developer workflow. This way developers can confidently deploy apps using their favorite languages and frameworks—including .NET, Java,—as containers. The express goal for using cloud-native technologies is to abstract the infrastructure from developers, thus freeing them to focus on building more cloud-optimized applications. Serverless computing is an exciting manifestation of this. Azure Container Apps is built for serverless containers and optimized for managed microservices. Azure Container Apps is focused on productivity across all stages of the applications’ lifecycle from streamlined deployment to the cloud, to leveraging microservices best practices in dev/test environments with focus on optional Dapr integration, to seamless microservices components integration in production.
Building applications goes beyond development. Most apps may not require deeper control and operations management. Apps of the future are cloud-native and help you focus on productivity with Serverless to accelerate time to market, or production. Application solutions that are event driven, reacting to triggers in near real-time with virtually unlimited scalability are a perfect fit for serverless architectures. The best part is that with serverless compute, you only pay for when your code runs. Microsoft’s flagship Functions-as-a-Service offering, Azure Functions, further extends serverless productivity to full stack modern apps with Azure Static Web Apps.
Azure Static Web Apps is a great choice for modern web apps offering streamlined full-stack development from source code to global high availability. We deliver zero config deployment based on code changes, distribute your web content globally, support routing, authentication and authorization, custom domains and free certificates, API integration, and more. To deliver seamless experiences we learn about the frameworks that matter to you and build that insight into the hosting service. Next.js is the latest framework to be onboarded with support for Server-Side Rendering (SSR), Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), API Routes, advanced image compression, and Next.js Auth.
To support a variety of full stack modern web apps, Azure Static Web Apps includes multiple options for APIs. You can power your APIs with fully managed Azure Functions – just bring your code and the Azure Static Web Apps service will take care of building and provisioning the functions for you. You can also link existing APIs for easy reuse. When linked, any requests to a route prefixed with /api is routed to your backend resource. You no longer need to worry about integration points like cross-origin resource sharing (or CORS). We also deliver end to end authentication for a seamless experience across front end and backend. We now support multiple API types including Azure Functions, Azure Container Apps, Azure App Service Web Apps, and Azure API Management.
Azure Serverless is the platform built for next-gen apps, today, supporting all ecosystem integrations highlighted here. Azure Serverless not only accelerates cloud-native application development but also boosts developer productivity. With Functions as a Service at the core of Serverless, Azure Functions offers the best in-class inner loop and outer loop serverless developer experience.
Learn more about Azure Cloud-native at Microsoft Ignite
- Deepen your skills with hand-picked learning modules, documentation, and community content.
- Watch all the sessions you loved, or catch up on any you missed after the event with Ignite on-demand.
- Ask The Experts (hybrid) for deeper dive! Join Microsoft experts through live QnA for technical content to keep your learning going.
- Join us for the in-person Expert Meetup to learn about scaling productivity with Kubernetes and Serverless.
- Read how you can Modernize with Microsoft Cloud, the most complete developer platform.
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