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.
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.
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
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Find resources to make adoption easier
Explore Kubernetes resources including videos, articles, books, and technical webinars.
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Explore cost-optimization strategies for cloud-native applications on Azure
Learn how Kubernetes on Azure can help you reduce costs for cloud-native applications.
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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.
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Learn about AKS Production Baseline
Get recommendations for networking, security, identity, management, and monitoring of the cluster based on your organization's business requirements.
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Get expert guidance
Join AKS office hours for the latest on Kubernetes from Microsoft Kubernetes engineers and Azure Kubernetes experts.
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"Azure provides the global datacenter footprint and geo-replicated services needed to ensure operational efficiency, minimal latency, and smooth deployment of updates across the world."Thomas Spatzier, Cloud Architect, Mercedes-Benz R&D
"We wanted a platform to speed development and testing but to do it safely, without losing control over security and performance. That's why Azure and AKS are the perfect fit for us."
Ståle Heitmann, Chief Technology Officer, Hafslund Nett
"When we started our journey on Azure, we were a really small team—just one or two developers. Our partnership with Microsoft, the support from their advisory teams, the great AKS documentation, and enterprise expertise—it all helped us very much to succeed."Bernhard Rode, Software Engineer, Bosch
"Microsoft leads the pack with the strongest developer experience and global reach. ... [It] is the best fit for companies seeking a trusted partner to manage containers at scale."The Forrester New Wave™: Public Cloud Enterprise Container Platforms, Q3 2019
These organizations found success with Kubernetes on Azure
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
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.
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.
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
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 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
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.