Yesterday, Microsoft made some exciting announcements about new serverless and DevOps capabilities we’ll be contributing to the community. We announced Virtual Kubelet, the next version Kubernetes connector for Azure Container Instances, Open Service Broker for Azure, which makes it easier for you to connect your containers to Azure services, and Kashti, a dashboard and visualization tool for Brigade pipelines.
Today, we’re shifting gears to focus on the Kubernetes ecosystem. What makes the Kubernetes community so great is the diversity of members, who bring so many different technologies to the table. As Microsoft works to make Azure the best place to run Kubernetes, and we continue to bring the Windows Server Containers ecosystem closer to the Kubernetes community, we’ll continue to forge new and enhance existing partnerships to make sure the tools you need are available and working great across our platforms. Today, I’m proud to share two new collaborations with Heptio and Tigera, as well as some progress we’ve made working with SIG Windows.
Heptio to bring Kubernetes Disaster Recovery and Migration Solutions to Azure
Today, my former colleague and fellow co-founder of Kubernetes, Craig McLuckie, CEO and co-founder of Heptio announced that Heptio and Microsoft will collaborate to bring Heptio Ark to Azure. Ark is a utility for managing disaster recovery and facilitating migration for Kubernetes across on premise and public cloud environments. Heptio Ark provides a simple, configurable and operationally robust way to back up and restore applications and persistent volumes from a series of checkpoints. The two companies are working together to bring these benefits to Azure customers, to help simplify Kubernetes usage on Microsoft’s cloud platform, whether they are all in on public cloud or working across on-premises and Azure. Check out Craig’s blog for more details.
Tigera and Microsoft partnering to simplify network security for Windows Server Containers
I’m also excited to share that we’re partnering with Tigera and continuing our work with SIG Windows to bring Windows Server Containers closer to the Kubernetes community. With Windows Server version 1709, Windows now has parity with Linux for Kubernetes networking from a platform perspective. To showcase these new networking features, we’re working with Tigera to contribute to Project Calico, a community based, free and open source solution designed to simplify, scale and secure container networks and applications running in them. Be sure to check the blog on securing modern applications with Calico and Windows.
Ecosystem delivering Windows and Kubernetes solutions for the enterprise
I'm thrilled to report that Microsoft, with help from SIG-Windows participants like Cloudbase, Apprenda, and Red Hat, is shipping beta support for Windows Server Containers in Kubernetes 1.9. This is a major milestone that helps expand Kubernetes into the huge number of enterprises who have made significant investments in .NET and Windows based applications. Additionally, kubeadm now works on Windows, which means customers can use this popular community tool to bootstrap Kubernetes nodes running Windows Server. I’m also pleased to share that terrific progress is being made on pod autoscaling via Heapster, e2e testing for Windows components, and Windows documentation updates for Kubernetes 1.9. You can find more details on the Kubernetes blog announcement of Windows Support in Kubernetes 1.9.
Strength through diversity
Diversity is not just about working with the myriad of companies in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Diversity is also about all the different people who bring different opinions and ideas to our community. I’m proud to work at a company like Microsoft where diversity is championed and supported, and Microsoft is thrilled to help bring more diversity into the Kubernetes community. It has been a highlight of KubeCon so far to see Microsoft, Google, and others come together to provide a diversity scholarship designed to promote KubeCon attendance from under-represented communities. KubeCon and the Kubernetes community derives its strength through diversity. I’d like to say “thank you” to Google, the CNCF, and every single one of you who come together each day to empower the Kubernetes community.
Share your feedback
Microsoft will continue our commitment to the open source and the Kubernetes experience on Azure and beyond. Your feedback remains invaluable to us, so please let us know what you think about these new partnerships. Keep sharing what’s working, and what you’d like to see going forward whether here at the show, through project contributions, or in the comments. I also hope you’ll drop by the Azure booth and our sessions throughout the week. I’m excited to meet you all!