Prior to launch, I spoke to Brendan Burns, corporate vice president, Azure OSS and Cloud Native, who was one of the original Kubernetes developers and now leads much of Microsoft’s Kubernetes program. Burns notes:
[AKS Automatic is about] letting us take over more and more automation and allow teams to focus on their applications. The truth is that we have developed a ton of core competencies around running Kubernetes at scale and managing Kubernetes at scale, but, obviously, the customer wants to run their application, and they are the subject matter experts in their applications.
Building on real-world experience
It’s not only Microsoft’s own experience with Kubernetes that helped build AKS Automatic, but also the lessons learned from its customers. Azure’s support organization can see what causes problems, while Microsoft’s consultancy arm has helped build and configure environments for customers of all sizes. As Burns points out:
We’ve got years and years of customer support tickets showing us how people can effectively make problems for themselves. We’re taking that knowledge and that learning and encoding it into policy-based best practices. It actually means that we can prevent developers from making those same mistakes that other people have made in the past. And I think that’s pretty cool too, right? I’ve talked a lot about the open ecosystem, but this is another version of that where we’re actually learning from everybody else’s experience.
This approach means Microsoft can give AKS Automatic the settings and features that work for most users and applications. With them, you should be able to stand up a Kubernetes environment and deploy code from a registry that complies with the Open Container Initiative, using familiar tools like Helm.
