Join Microsoft at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022

Welcome to KubeCon Europe 2022. While I am unfortunately stuck in rainy Seattle (coldest start to May in 20 years), I’m excited that many of our cloud-native Azure folks will be able to experience sunny Valencia. It’s especially exciting for KubeCon to be the first chance for parts of the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) team to meet up with folks who joined us from Kinvolk nearly a year ago. Regardless of whether you are journeying to KubeCon or taking it in virtually, Microsoft Azure is planning a great presence for the event. We’re looking forward to talking to you at the booth, in our talks, and of course in the most awesome track of all, the hallway track.

AKS continues to grow at a record pace, and in recognition of this interest, we’re excited to add a new Kubernetes on Azure pre-day event. Whether you are an existing user of AKS or looking to get started with cloud-native development in Azure, we’re looking forward to connecting with you and helping you connect with other Azure users.

One of the most exciting areas where AKS is growing is in the world of gaming. We’ve already talked about how Kubernetes on Azure helps power our Xbox streaming game service. More recently the Azure Kubernetes Service helped Forza Horizon 5 become the 2021 game of the year. In celebration of this awesome collaboration, we’re hosting an Activation Zone featuring Forza Horizon 5. Come spend some time in an amazing setting and one of the places I’ve been spending a lot of my gaming time lately (did I mention it’s been rainy in Seattle).

Of course, not everything can be fun and games and one of the most serious things that we have been focused on lately is securing the software supply chain. Security is always one of the most important things that we can be doing, but many recent events have made it crystal clear how critical it is to get security right. It can be daunting to think about how to secure your containers or to talk to your CSO about cloud-native computing. To help you get started we’ve written a great blog to get you started with container security from our learnings over the last few years of securing containerized services within Azure. But security is far more than just your software, it’s also about the setup of your cluster which is why we’re excited to announce two important new features for AKS cluster security. The first is the ability for you to encrypt all of the data in etcd using a customer-managed key stored in Azure Key Vault. With key management support (KMS) for AKS, you can be certain that you are in complete control of when someone can access the data in your AKS cluster. The other important preview feature is Azure Private Link service support. Private Link service support enables you to easily configure AKS with Private Link capabilities. Private links enable you to securely share services with other users without exposing them on the public network.

In addition to all of the work on container security, the AKS team has been really busy driving our vision of Azure as the easiest, most secure destination for your AKS workloads for users from startups to enterprises. Whether you are a startup or an enterprise, networking is a core part of any cloud-native application and we’re excited to be able to bring two important networking features to general availability, bring-your-own container network interface (CNI) and Open Service Mesh (OSM) are now generally available on AKS—enabling users flexibility in their networking plugins and a rock-solid open-source service mesh supported by Azure.

Speaking of flexibility, we have also added a number of features to enable users to better adapt AKS to their environments. This includes the general availability of the API to assign different node pools to different network subnets, the ability to use process containers for Windows containers, and a new API to control which container storage interfaces (CSI) are available within your cluster.

Many, many congratulations to the awesome Azure teams that helped us deliver all of these capabilities to our customers!

Learn more

Over the last six years its been incredible to see the growth in Azure Kubernetes Service, Linux, and open source in Microsoft Azure and nowhere is this more apparent than in the number of people and talks that we have at KubeCon:

• Notary v2: Deep Dive and Open Issues—Justin Cormack, Docker and Steve Lasker, Microsoft.
• The Hitchiker’s Guide to Pod Security—Lachlan (Lachie) Evenson, Microsoft.
• You’re a Community Manager? But What Do You REALLY Do?!—Nanci Lancaster, VMWare and Karen Chu, Microsoft.
• Distributing Supply Chain Artifacts with OCI and ORAS—Steve Lasker, Microsoft.
• To IPv6: The Dual-stack Adoption Advisory Panel—Bridget Kromhout, Microsoft, Tim Hockin, Google, Dinesh Majrekar, Civo, Lachlan (Lachie) Evenson, Microsoft, Rags Srinivas, InfoQ.

Whether you are in person or online, check out these great talks, come to our Azure on Kubernetes pre-day event, stop by the booth, or just come play some Forza Horizon! Have an awesome KubeCon.

Brendan Burns

Corporate Vice President, Azure OSS and Cloud Native, Microsoft

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