Join Microsoft at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

Welcome to Amsterdam and KubeCon Europe 2023. I’m thrilled to see the continued importance of community and getting together to meet our friends and colleagues across the industry and around the world. As we come together in Amsterdam, there are significant headwinds and challenges facing us, but I’m confident that open-source and cloud-native computing are critical parts of the solutions. 

When our teams in Microsoft Azure think about Kubernetes, we are deeply focused on providing enterprise-grade solutions that enable our customers to harness this power of cloud-native to achieve more. One of the significant challenges that many of our customers face is the macroeconomic environment and the uncertainty of the economy. To help, we have been working with the OpenCost project to integrate true cloud-native cost management into Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). I’m excited to announce that you can now use OpenCost, an open-source vendor-neutral Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project, with AKS. Born out of the startup behind KubeCost, OpenCost introduces a community-driven specification and accompanying implementation to give customers deep insight into the costs of running their applications on Kubernetes. We have been involved not just in running OpenCost on AKS but contributing back to the OpenCost community and we look forward to further engagement going forward. 

Of course, economic success means nothing if it is not sustainable, and that’s why I’m thrilled that we are working on building a sustainable, carbon-aware cloud with Kubernetes. We have been leveraging the Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling (KEDA) project that Microsoft previously contributed to the CNCF to develop a carbon aware scaling in KEDA that enables your workload to scale and minimize the carbon footprint of your compute. Please attend our keynote “Building a Sustainable, Carbon-Aware Cloud: Scale Workloads and Reduce Emissions” on April 19, 2023, from 10:00 AM to 10:05 AM CEST to learn more about Microsoft’s continuing commitment to a sustainable future. 

The open-source community is at the core of our work on cost management and sustainability and indeed, open source is at the core of what it means to be cloud-native. We’re excited to announce even more open source work on top of AKS including our launch of a managed Istio service, further advances in the state of WebAssembly and Kubernetes, as well as Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus (preview) that you can use to monitor both your AKS cluster and your cloud-native applications. 

In addition to our commitment to open source, another critical component of AKS is supporting enterprise-grade solutions on our platform. We’re excited to announce that there is now an Azure native backup solution for AKS that lets you quickly and reliably recover your cluster in case of catastrophe. We’re also bringing the Azure AD workload identity service to general availability, enabling enterprises to use industry-standard identity for all of their applications. 

Since the beginning of cloud-native, one of the most significant challenges for enterprises has been the pace of change. Kubernetes has consistently delivered innovation with a release every three to four months for nearly a decade, a pace that is amazing, but also a challenge to keep up with. To provide greater flexibility, we are thrilled to announce that AKS is now offering Long Term Support (LTS) for Kubernetes that will enable our users to stay on a specific version of Kubernetes for two years, twice as long as is possible today. Enabling a long-term support branch for Kubernetes has been a long-time discussion in the community and we look forward to continuing this discussion and developing a true community-supported, open-source LTS of Kubernetes. 

When I look to the future of Kubernetes, I’m excited to see how generative AI can change what it means to be a cloud-native developer. We’ve seen an explosion of innovation including from our AKS team that developed the kubectl-ai plugin that embeds generative YAML into the kubectl command line itself. I’m equally excited that many of the innovations in AI are themselves trained and run on top of containers and Kubernetes. It’s exciting to see our community’s contribution to the future of AI. 

Discover more at KubeCon Europe 2023

Enjoy KubeCon Europe 2023 and be sure to visit the Microsoft Azure booth and check out some interesting sessions by Microsoft experts. We’ve got some great Kubernetes experts in the Azure booth and we look forward to chatting with you about all of these great innovations and everything cloud-native. And if all the talk and tech become a little overwhelming, we’re excited to welcome you to our gaming lounge where you can relax with some of the latest games on Xbox.  

We look forward to seeing you!

Brendan Burns

Corporate Vice President, Azure OSS and Cloud Native, Microsoft

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