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Microsoft Azure, which has been continuing to gain features that make it easier to use it with the Kubernetes container orchestration system, now allows users to deploy multiple apps to a single Azure Kubernetes Service cluster (AKS) at once.
The new capability, which was announced by Atul Malaviya, principal program manager for Azure DevOps, in a Feb. 20 post on the Azure Blog, is now generally available for users of Azure DevOps Projects. The added feature came as a result of customer reaction to using prerelease versions of the tools.
“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,” wrote Malaviya. “Today we are happy to share that now you can use Azure DevOps Projects to deploy multiple apps to a single AKS cluster.”
Azure DevOps Projects is a tool that enables users to build any Azure application or service in a few simple steps, according to Microsoft. It can be used, for instance, to provision AKS or Azure Container Registry, or to build and deploy a container app to AKS using Azure Pipelines.
“Creating a DevOps Projects [task] provisions Azure resources and comes with a git code repository, Application Insights integration and a continuous delivery pipeline setup to deploy to Azure,” wrote Malaviya. “The DevOps Projects dashboard lets you monitor code commits, builds and deployments from a single view in the Azure portal.”
By using Azure DevOps Projects to perform the work, users can get up and running with a new app and a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline in just a few minutes, while taking advantage of support for a wide range of popular frameworks such as .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js and Python. Developers can start from scratch or can bring their own application from GitHub to build the app, while also being able to integrate built-in Application Insights and Azure Monitor for containers integration tools for analytics and actionable insights, he wrote.
“Kubernetes is going from strength to strength as adoption across the industry continues to grow,” wrote Malaviya. “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.”
AKS helps with this goal by being a fully managed Kubernetes container orchestration service, which simplifies the deployment and operations of Kubernetes and enables users to dynamically scale their application infrastructure with confidence and agility.
AKS allows users to provision clusters via the Azure portal and Azure CLI, or with infrastructure as code tools such as Azure Resources Manager and Terraform, wrote Malaviya. “Simplify cluster maintenance with automated upgrades and scaling. And gain operational visibility into your managed Kubernetes environment with control plane telemetry, log aggregation, and container health visible as part of the Azure portal, automatically configured for AKS clusters.”
The AKS infrastructure is 100 percent open-source Kubernetes, which enables developers to take full advantage of the services and tools in the Kubernetes ecosystem.