Microsoft’s Azure and Azure Arc cloud management platforms continue to evolve, as evidenced by a number of product announcements at this week’s Ignite 2022 conference. And bringing Kubernetes container support to more endpoints is a big part of its distributed cloud orientation.
Microsoft announced this week that public preview of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) on Windows IoT and Windows devices will be on the market in November. This lightweight version of AKS – which officials call “AKS lite” in their October 12 blog post – will work on microprocessor-type devices and PCs running Windows 10 or 11 IoT Enterprise, Windows 10 or 11 Pro, or Windows Server.
AKS lite is Microsoft’s own Kubernetes distribution, built to run both Windows and Linux workloads, which officials initially announced at Build earlier this year as “Project Haven.” (For Linux containers, Haven runs Microsoft’s own CBL-Mariner Linux distribution.) These containers can be managed using Azure Arc.
“Container deployment and management is becoming key to many of our customers’ IT plans,” said Erin Chapple, Microsoft’s Vice President of Azure Core. By writing applications to run in containers, users will be able to take parts of that application and deploy and manage them wherever the container platform is running, whether it’s in the public cloud. plus on Azure, on Windows/Windows Server, on IoT devices.
“In the early days, (Azure) Arc more than an on-the-spot mindset. It allows you to manage (on-premises assets) from the cloud and connect to the cloud,” notes Chapple. But now, for many customers, “apps are the focus,” she said. And some parts of the application may run in the cloud, while others may need to be on-premises for various reasons.
Which parts of any given workload are optimized to run in places that often link back to data, she said. For example, it can sometimes make more sense to train an AI model at the edge because users may not want or need to pump all their data into one database. But in other cases, they may want to train it in the cloud, especially if they need the most up-to-date infrastructure.. ”
For customers interested in using AKS plus Azure Arc to manage their applications from cloud to edge, Microsoft also announced this week that extending Azure Hybrid Benefit to AKS and Azure Stack HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure). This allows customers to run AKS on Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI at no additional cost if they have a Windows Software Assurance and Cloud Solution Provider Subscription.
