Kubernetes is going from strength to strength as adoption across the industry continues to grow. But there are still plenty of customers coming to container orchestration for the first time while also building up their familiarity with Docker and containers in general. We see the need to help teams go from a container image, or just a git repo, and help get them to an app running in Kubernetes in as few steps as possible. It’s also important that we do this in a way that will allow them to customize afterward and build on their knowledge as they go.
At Microsoft, we are trying to make it easy for our customers to adopt Kubernetes by offering two solutions.
First is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), a fully managed Kubernetes container orchestration service. AKS simplifies the deployment and operations of Kubernetes and enables you to dynamically scale your application infrastructure with confidence and agility.
The other is Azure DevOps Projects, a simplified experience which helps you launch an app on an Azure Service of your choice in a few quick steps. For example, in just a matter of minutes, it can help you provision AKS, Azure Container Registry, and start building and deploying a container app to AKS by using Azure Pipelines. Creating a DevOps Projects provisions Azure resources and comes with a git code repository, Application Insights integration, and a continuous delivery pipeline setup to deploy to Azure. The DevOps Projects dashboard lets you monitor code commits, builds, and deployments from a single view in the Azure portal.
Key benefits of Azure DevOps Projects are:
- Get up and running with a new app and a CI/CD pipeline in just a few minutes
- Support for a wide range of popular frameworks such as .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, and Python
- Start fresh or bring your own application from GitHub
- Built-in Application Insights and Azure Monitor for containers integration for instant analytics and actionable insights
- Cloud-powered CI/CD using Azure DevOps
Several customers are using Azure DevOps Projects to deploy their apps to AKS, but a clear piece of feedback we received from early adopters was to add support for reusing an existing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster in Azure DevOps Projects rather than have to create a new one each time.
Today we are happy to share that now you can use Azure DevOps Projects to deploy multiple apps to a single AKS cluster. This feature is generally available in the Azure portal. To get started create an Azure DevOps Projects now. For more information, please read our Azure DevOps Projects documentation.
