Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) has received a major update. New features focus on efficiency, cost optimization, scalability, security and observability.
In the new AKS update, unveiled at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Microsoft pays close attention to efficient management of Kubernetes environments. For this purpose, “kube-reserved resource optimization” has been made generally available. This should help resource reservation algorithms use 20 percent less of the required memory.
For greater efficiency, a public preview of Artifact streaming support in AKS has also been announced. This allows enterprises to scale workloads without having to wait for container images to be fully loaded into Kubernetes clusters.
Scalability
For more scalability within AKS, an Istio-based mesh service add-on has now been presented in public preview. Among other things, the service provides egress support and allows users to add their own certificate authority and better manage Istio upgrades.
In the context of increased scalability, an add-on for Kubernetes event-driven autoscaling was also presented. This should greatly simplify event-driven auto-scaling of applications.
Furthermore, the preview of Azure Container Storage in AKS allows enterprises to deploy dedicated container storage in 26 cloud regions. This should facilitate volume provisioning and management of stateful container applications.
Networking and security
AKS is also getting updates for networking and security. These include a new image integrity feature that can quickly determine whether container images come from a trusted source and have not been redacted.
The public preview of dual-stack support for Azure CNI Overlay for AKS should improve the networking capabilities of Microsoft’s Kubernetes distri. This includes allowing both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in a single cluster. This should give users more flexibility and control for connectivity.
Other updates in this category include a new application routing add-on for AKS and the public preview of Azure Backup for AKS.
More observability
Important updates remain for increasing observability in AKS and the workloads residing in it. For this purpose, Azure Monitor for Prometheus is becoming available. With this, users of AKS can collect and analyze all metrics within the Kubernets distri on a large scale. This using a Prometheus-compatible monitoring platform. Above all, this helps keep a close eye on the performance of the infrastructure in use.
Finally, companies can now use Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry-based distributions for Node.js and Python. This gives more insight into errors, bottlenecks and user patterns of Kubernetes clusters.
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