Microsoft Magic Quadrant 2023
Kubernetes and containers are the future of application development. They are pleased to announce that Microsoft Magic Quadrant. They feel this validation confirms their end-to-end strategy to designing and delivering enterprise-grade, cloud-native applications on Azure, in datacenters, or at the edge.
According to Gartner, Microsoft Magic Quadrant Leadership emphasizes Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)’s extensive and deep integration with other Azure services. Customers tell us that adopting AKS for container management lets them upgrade current applications as time and money allow and offers a roadmap for cloud-native development that leverages Azure scalability, security, performance, and cost optimization. Developers use autoscaling AKS clusters to satisfy the toughest performance requirements, while fully managed Azure services save teams time.
Customers want to run containers wherever. AKS is managed by Azure Stack HCI on-premises and Azure Arc for clients on Azure and hybrid settings.
Scaling up requires improving skills
At KubeCon North America 2023 and Microsoft Ignite, they launched Microsoft Copilot for Azure. Developers may use this AI-powered assistant to get answers and work more effectively, including AKS.
At the conferences, several developers said AKS’ integration help made adoption simpler as their firms launch big digital transformation initiatives. Kubernetes manages numerous moving pieces, yet a learning curve exists. Container knowledge is still scarce, according to Gartner.
AKS Principal PM Lead Jorge Palma posted. Companies should not install container management “without deep knowledge of developer requirements,” according to Gartner.
Developers may use Azure and AKS more using Copilot for Azure. Microsoft provides various resources for developers at whatever stage of adoption.
At the blank page stage, solution architectures might provide real-world examples and ideas.
Kubernetes solutions and services in Azure Marketplace provide click-through installations and customizable payment structures.
Inspire yourself by reading how the Forza Horizon 5 development team transitioned services to AKS in a month without Kubernetes experience, resulting in Xbox Games Studio’s largest first week ever.
Choose a Microsoft Learn professional course like Introduction to Kubernetes on Azure or Administer containers on Azure to improve skills.
Review developer best practices to manage deployment.
AKS fueling AI revolution
Often based atop Kubernetes, generative AI is quickly spreading. This revolution of intelligent applications is powered by cloud-native and AI, and AKS is part of it. AKS app developers may use Azure OpenAI Service.
AKS enabled artifact streaming for AI applications’ larger container pictures. Container images may be transmitted to high-performance, on-demand protocol nodes. That accelerates pod scheduling and startup.
AI applications stretch scale, making cost control crucial. Microsoft recently stated that Azure portal teams may see cluster expenses more clearly. AKS’s cost analysis add-on leverages OpenCost to break down cluster infrastructure expenses by cluster and namespace.
AKS also makes running specialized machine learning workloads like large language models (LLMs) cheaper and requiring less human setup. The new Kaito-based AI toolchain operator simplifies hosting and sharing open-source AI models and customized inferencing on AKS clusters. Using the new open-source Karpenter on AKS provider may improve cluster efficiency and expenses.
Microsoft just added Kubernetes fleet support for scaled AKS cluster management. Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager safely and predictably stages cluster changes.
DevOps drives things
As Gartner notes, “the combination of DevOps and container technology can be a powerful enabler for application development agility and speed, making DevOps skills the critical factor to deployment success.” Quality and consistency in provisioning and management, including continuous integration and deployment, are promoted by DevOps.
However, designing distributed applications remains complicated, therefore the AKS team is looking for methods to simplify it. New smart defaults speed cluster setup, and Draft for AKS simplifies Kubernetes deployment. They introduced Dapr APIs in June 2023 to assist developers build easy, portable, robust, and secure microservices. Azure Pipelines CI/CD automates AKS cluster builds.
Cloud deployment and AI workloads will be simpler for Azure Container Apps developers. A new “code-to-cloud” integrated cloud build productivity lets developers create and execute Azure Container programs programs without container understanding. The new landing zone accelerator is also useful for cloud-native app and microservice creators. GPU workload profiles power compute-intensive applications like model training and batch inferencing.
Protecting all
The use of CSP-native platforms will increase public cloud container instance deployment to 75% by 2026 from 50% in 2023, according to Gartner. At KubeCon and Ignite, IT, operational, and cybersecurity specialists from across the globe discussed cloud security. Microsoft dedicates itself to giving customers the tools and resources to secure everything. That includes container security from development to runtime and across hybrid and multicloud deployments.
They introduced multicloud container security for Microsoft Defender for Cloud at Ignite 2023. Defender cloud security posture management (CSPM) will add agentless scanning, data-aware security posture, cloud security graph, and attack path analysis to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), providing a single contextual view of cloud risks across AWS, Azure, GCP, and hybrid environments.
Security administrators may prioritize misconfigurations and exposures in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and Google Kubernetes Engine clusters by having improved insight into containerized workloads.
The Microsoft Security blog provides professional security coverage, while the AKS documentation discusses application and cluster security principles.
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