Today, we’re excited to share with you the specifics of the new Azure Arc Validation Program. Along with participating Kubernetes (K8s) distribution providers - Canonical, Nutanix, Red Hat, SUSE Rancher and VMware - we’ve established this program to further increase customers confidence in deploying Arc enabled Kubernetes in production workloads, and at scale. Thanks to participating organizations for completing conformance tests of their distributions with Azure Arc and various management extensions, in marching towards the general availability of Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes this week.
Containers have seen remarkable adoption by customers of all segments - thanks to automation and scale benefits they bear. Furthermore, many hybrid workloads base their architectures on containers, extending data services and application platforms across cloud and on-premises, using Kubernetes to orchestrate management and discovery. Given these customer patterns, Arc Validation Program starts with Kubernetes distributions to build the baseline for all future expansions.
Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes is designed and engineered to work with any Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) certified Kubernetes distribution, which gives our customers the first layer of confidence through industry standards. What is unique about the Arc Validation Program is that engineering teams of participating organizations work closely with the Azure Arc engineering team to complete additional sets of interoperability and compatibility tests, while also committing that future minor and major versions of their distributions will be validated with Azure Arc. Thus, we’re collectively layering further trust into the equation and into the future.
Azure Arc Validation Program conformance tests ensure connections to Azure, identity attributes, resource metadata representations, configuration and log management work as expected, in addition to multiple other scenarios tested. The following Kubernetes distributions have successfully passed conformance tests leading to the general availability milestone this week.
- Canonical; Charmed Kubernetes 1.19
- Nutanix; Karbon 2.2.1
- Red Hat; OpenShift 4.5, 4.6, 4.7
- SUSE Rancher; Rancher 2.5
- VMWare; TKG 1.17.5
In addition to the prominent distributions above, Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes is also validated to work with Microsoft’s own distributions and experiences: AKS, AKS engine on Azure Stack Hub, and AKS on Azure Stack HCI.
We’ll continue our investments in hybrid to meet customers where they are, delivering the ability to run key workloads and applications in the environment best suited for their business. In expressing gratitude for all partners that participated in the validation program, we’d like to invite customers to share which additional appliances and Kubernetes distributions they’d like to see validated here! If your organization is a Kubernetes provider interested in the validation program, you can contact us at arcformsp@microsoft.com .