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Kubernetes on Azure

Enterprise-grade by design.

Build your enterprise Kubernetes expertise

Learn from thousands of customer engagements with Kubernetes on Azure. Watch the video to learn how others have done it.

1,000s

of enterprise engagements to inform best practices

3,500

security experts focused on your data security and privacy

365

days a year of on-call support from certified service providers

Built-in best practices

Receive proactive and actionable recommendations for securing resources, maintaining cluster hygiene, and increasing operational efficiency.

Enterprise support

Get support from Kubernetes Certified Service Providers and a self-service experience for faster diagnostics and troubleshooting.

Multilayer security

Implement hardened security and layers of isolation across compute resources, data, and networking.

Unified management

Enable consistent configuration and governance across clouds, on-premises, and the edge with Azure Arc.

Built-in best practices

Optimize your Kubernetes deployments with real-time personalized recommendations based on our knowledge from working with thousands of enterprise customers. Automatically analyze the configuration of your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster and usage telemetry, proactively identify potential issues, and get guidance from Azure Advisor. Advisor helps you improve performance, availability, and Kubernetes cluster security before there's a problem.

Whether you're a new or a seasoned Kubernetes user, receive industry best practices and an experience that offers guidance like pre-defined policies and flags for any unexpectedly deprecated Kubernetes APIs. Explore cost optimization strategies including spot node pools with cluster autoscaler, enforcement of Kubernetes resource quotas using Azure Policy, and optimization of the data tier.

An example of built-in best practices

Multilayer security

Achieve hardened security and layers of isolation across OS, compute resources, data, and networking with consistent configuration, identity, secret, and policy management.

Consistently enforce compliance rules on your clusters and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines using Azure Policy, which is built on Open Policy Agent. Apply fine-grained identity and access control using Azure Active Directory, and gain unmatched security management, intelligent threat detection, and actionable recommendations with Azure Security Center integration.

Enterprise support

Gain peace of mind by working with solution architects from Microsoft or our partners. Get help blueprinting and implementing Kubernetes—from trial to scaling. And as a customer, access on-call support at any time.

Determine the root cause of common Kubernetes cluster issues sooner with an intelligent, self-diagnostic tool in the Azure portal. Access the same technologies Microsoft customer support teams use to analyze, detect, and resolve common problems like insufficient resources, lack of subnet capacity, and node authorization error.

An open concept office with people working at their desks
A diagram depicting unified management between multi-cloud, on-premises and edge environments

Unified management across environments

Organize and govern Kubernetes clusters and servers that are sprawling across clouds, datacenters, and edge with Azure Arc. Enforce organization standards and assess compliance at scale with Azure Policy. Get a centralized real time view of performance and health with Azure Monitor.

Achieve application management at scale with DevOps-based techniques for ultimate consistency across Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and other Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters in different environments.

Get the right support at your stage of Kubernetes adoption

  • Follow the Kubernetes adoption checklist

    See what to consider as you adopt Kubernetes—from trial to scale—regarding security, operations, app lifecycle management, and architecture. Find the answers you need with templates, code samples, expert tutorials, real-world best practice articles.

  • Learn about AKS Production Baseline

    Get recommendations for networking, security, identity, management, and monitoring of the cluster based on your organization's business requirements.

  • Get expert guidance

    Join AKS office hours for the latest on Kubernetes from Microsoft Kubernetes engineers and Azure Kubernetes experts.

These organizations found success with Kubernetes on Azure

Run Kubernetes on Azure

A diagram outlining development tools, platforms and data and integration apps that run Kubernetes on Azure
  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): Highly available, secure, and fully managed Kubernetes service
  • Azure Red Hat OpenShift: Fully managed OpenShift service, jointly operated with Red Hat
  • Azure Container Instances: Service to run containers on Azure without managing servers

Enterprise features and services for Kubernetes on Azure

Azure Policy

Implement and enforce rules that are defined across multiple clusters and CI/CD pipelines. Track, validate, and reconfigure nodes, pods, and container images for compliance.

Azure Security Center

Gain unmatched security management, intelligent threat detection, and actionable recommendations for compliance.

Azure Advisor

Get smart recommendations to boost the performance, operational excellence, availability, and security for your applications.

Azure Arc

Deploy and manage Kubernetes applications across environments using DevOps techniques. Ensure that applications are consistently deployed and configured from source control.

Azure Cosmos DB

Implement a fully managed database service with turnkey global distribution and transparent multi-master replication. Get single-digit millisecond read and write latencies at the 99th percentile, automatic and elastic scaling of throughput and storage worldwide, 99.999-percent high availability, and five well-defined consistency choices—all backed by industry-leading comprehensive SLAs.

Azure Machine Learning

Deploy models faster with this enterprise-grade machine learning service. Innovate on a secure, trusted platform designed for responsible AI, and foster team collaboration with industry-leading MLOps—DevOps for machine learning.

...

Azure Active Directory

Gain fine-grained control of access over your cluster and pod through an integrated sign-on experience.

Azure Private Link

Ensure that all Kubernetes management operations remain completely isolated by interacting with the Kubernetes API server as a private endpoint in your virtual network.

Azure Container Registry

Deploy only validated images to your private container registry, which comes with built-in Helm chart support. Automatically geo-replicate to datacenters close to your users.

GitHub Actions

Build end-to-end CI/CD capabilities targeted to AKS clusters directly in your GitHub repository.

Azure Monitor

Gain visibility into your environment with control-plane telemetry, log aggregation, and container health, accessible in the Azure portal and automatically configured for Kubernetes clusters. Azure Monitor integrates with Prometheus for cluster and application monitoring and uses Grafana dashboards for visualization.

AKS virtual nodes

Enable elastic provisioning of additional capacity without the need to manage the infrastructure. Add event-driven autoscaling and triggers through Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA).

Azure Availability Zones

Achieve higher availability and protect applications from datacenter failures using redundancies across availability zones.

Azure API Management

Implement a hybrid, multi-cloud management platform for APIs across all environments.

Azure Cognitive Services

Build intelligent apps with help from A comprehensive family of AI services and cognitive APIs.

Empower teams to adopt Kubernetes at scale

Architects

Whether you’re building API-first applications, real-time recommendations, commerce platforms, or geo-distributed applications, follow a structured approach for designing applications that are scalable, resilient, and highly available, based on proven practices from customer engagements.

Infrastructure and ops managers

As your applications move to production, they often span multiple containers deployed across a cluster of servers—increasing in operational complexity and taking up time you could otherwise spend delivering value to your customers. Use a fully managed Kubernetes service like Azure Kubernetes Service to automate provisioning, upgrading, monitoring, and scaling for compute resources.

Developers

Integrate a managed Kubernetes platform that’s designed for developers seamlessly with your favorite IDE, CI/CD process, and monitoring tools to automate your workflows. With built-in CI/CD and container health monitoring, accelerate the move from code to container to Kubernetes cluster in minutes through automation.

Security administrator

Rely on a cloud with built-in security controls across identity, data, networking, and apps. Apply at-scale guardrails on your clusters in a centralized, consistent manner. Dramatically simplify the task of initializing and maintaining compliant environments with Azure Policy. Integrate your organization’s existing identity provider, such as Azure Active Directory, with the cluster. Azure Security Center enables container vulnerability scanning, security recommendations, environment hardening, and runtime protection.

Common enterprise use cases for Kubernetes on Azure

Elastic demand handling solution architecture

Handle spikes on demand

Offer customers fast and reliable service quality during seasonal and other high-traffic demand periods.

  • Handle traffic and sales bursts with instant, elastic scaling but without managing infrastructures.
  • Create fast, robust user experiences with low-latency data access from anywhere in the world.
  • Achieve high availability across multiple data centers.
Secure DevOps reference architecture

Implement secure DevOps for AKS

Increase team agility with streamlined DevOps without compromising security.

  • Deliver code faster with managed Kubernetes and built-in CI/CD.
  • Accelerate the feedback loop with real-time monitoring.
  • Implement continuous security and deep traceability.

 

API-first SaaS business model solution architecture

Evolve to an API-first SaaS business model

Adapt, evolve, and encourage faster innovation to turn opportunities into strategic advantages.

  • Create API gateways and developer portals in minutes and publish APIs easily for internal or external use.
  • Handle any data schema and adapt quickly to rapid changes.
  • Connect to back-end services anywhere and manage, secure, and optimize all APIs in one place.
Instant IoT data streaming solution architecture

Instant IoT data streaming

Ingest and analyze high volumes of IoT data and generate real-time recommendations and insights.

  • Ingest data in real time and create a processing pipeline capable of detection and notification within seconds.
  • Connect back-end services running anywhere with a secure API gateway.
  • Elastically provision compute capacity without the need to manage the infrastructure.
Real-time recommendation API on Azure solution architecture

Real-time personalized recommendations

Help customers discover items they’ll love.

  • Analyze high volumes of data in milliseconds.
  • Ensure high application performance worldwide with low latency.
  • Gain rapid insight with tunable data consistency models.
Machine learning operations reference architecture

Machine learning operations

Deliver innovation faster with robust machine learning lifecycle management.

  • Create reproducible workflows for traceability and consistent model delivery.
  • Train and deploy models anywhere with a managed Kubernetes service—backed by powerful GPU compute.
  • Automate with Azure DevOps and GitHub integration, and build for CI/CD.

What is Kubernetes?

Learn the basics. See how to build, deliver, and scale containerized apps faster with open source container orchestration.

Kubernetes learning and training

Make Kubernetes adoption easier with a curriculum that includes videos, articles, books, hands-on workshops, and technical webinars.

Try a Kubernetes workshop

Go through tasks to deploy a multi-container application to Kubernetes on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Kubernetes hands-on experience

Learn how to build and deploy container-based applications with Azure. Download the Kubernetes e-book collection.