Microsoft welcomes you to KubeCon Chicago

Hello and welcome to KubeCon North America. I’m thrilled to get a chance to meet up with everyone in person whether it is at one of the conference sessions, at the Microsoft booth, or the best part, the hallway track! Whether you’re a developer, a Site Reliability Engineer, or trying to figure out how cloud-native technology can help deliver more for your business, wherever you go at KubeCon, you’ll find Microsoft building and serving the open-source communities that serve our customers. This year we’ve got some key improvements and innovations in both Azure and our open source projects that will empower developers across the world to do more.

Empowering cloud-native development and AI innovation

The last year has brought a whirlwind of activity and inspiration to the space of AI. From a cloud-native perspective, it has been uniquely gratifying to see how much of the improvements in generative AI are being built on top of Kubernetes. Cloud-native and AI are deeply rooted together in fueling innovation at scale. We’re working hard to ensure Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) provides the scale customers need to run their compute intensive workloads like AI and machine learning.

Running at scale makes cost management more important than ever. I’m excited about the direction we’re heading in this area. Stop by to check out the theater sessions and get a sneak peek at the Azure portal experience for analyzing and optimizing AKS costs that will be coming out soon. Of course, as enterprises and other customers are adopting AI, the sizes of their container images continue to grow and that’s why we have introduced artifact streaming for AKS. Artifact streaming enables container images to be streamed directly to the nodes where they are running in high-performance, on-demand protocol which means pods schedule faster and start running more quickly.

Reliability, long-term support, and more to come

Reliability for all their applications is a key promise to customers everywhere. To help organizations build more reliable applications, we’ve enabled Azure Backup to AKS for disaster recovery. As with nearly everything we’ve built in AKS, it is based on open source.  

When we announced our support for a Kubernetes Long Term Support (LTS) release last spring at KubeCon EU, we had our enterprise customers in mind, but it has been fantastic to see broad interest in LTS from all our customers and from the Kubernetes community in general. I’m happy to see that Microsoft having the willingness to step forward and drive LTS in the community has resulted in new energy and I’m confident it will lead to a sustainable, community-driven LTS release of Kubernetes for Azure customers and anyone else wherever they run Kubernetes.

It’s been great to share everything that the team has been up to over the past year, but it’s even more exciting to think about the coming year. Whether it is new developments in artificial intelligence, copilots, WebAssembly, or platform engineering, the coming year promises to deliver even more open innovation in cloud-native open source and Azure will be at the heart of it. Stay tuned for more innovation that we are bringing to cloud-native developers coming at Microsoft Ignite. 

We’re excited to see you at KubeCon!

Join us at the Microsoft booth where our engineers and partners will have a full schedule of diverse daily talks covering topics such as building copilots, managing data on Kubernetes, securing supply chain for containers, using Arc to extend Azure services everywhere, and much more. We are looking forward to seeing you at the booth, at conference sessions, and keynotes throughout the conference.  

A new edition of Kubernetes Best Practices just came out. My co-authors and I will be at the Microsoft booth on Tuesday at 6:15 PM. Stop by to pick up your signed copy, or bring your own book for signing! Or just stop by and say Hi anytime.  

Welcome to Chicago!

Brendan Burns

Corporate Vice President, Azure OSS and Cloud Native, Microsoft

See more articles from this author