Cloud-native technologies similar containers and Kubernetes are the aboriginal of exertion development. That’s wherefore we’re honored to denote that Microsoft has been named a Leader successful the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management*. We judge that this designation validates our end-to-end attack for processing and deploying enterprise-grade, cloud-native apps that tally connected Azure, successful datacenters, oregon astatine the edge.

Figure 1. Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management. Source: Gartner (September 2023). 

Gartner designation of Microsoft arsenic a Leader successful this Magic Quadrant, we feel, highlights the wide and heavy integration of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with different Azure services. Customers archer america that utilizing AKS for instrumentality absorption helps them modernize existing apps successful stages, arsenic clip and fund permit, and creates a roadmap for new, cloud-native improvement that takes vantage of Azure scale, security, performance, and outgo optimization. Developers trust connected autoscaling AKS clusters to conscionable the astir challenging show demands, portion afloat managed Azure services escaped teams from time-consuming infrastructure absorption tasks.

Customers person divers environments and they privation to tally containers anywhere. Our customers tally AKS connected Azure and successful hybrid configurations, utilizing Azure Stack HCI on-premises and Azure Arc to negociate it all. 

Read the afloat report to larn much astir wherefore Microsoft was named a Leader for instrumentality management. 

Scaling up means skilling up 

Recently, we presented astatine KubeCon North America 2023 and astatine Microsoft Ignite, wherever we introduced Microsoft Copilot for Azure (in preview). This AI-powered adjunct makes it casual for developers to get the answers they request and to enactment much efficiently, including AKS.

Many developers astatine the conferences told america that the integration enactment successful AKS makes adoption easier arsenic their organizations rotation retired ambitious integer translation projects. Even though Kubernetes is designed to negociate the complexity of galore moving parts, that complexity has a learning curve. Container-related expertise is inactive limited, arsenic the Gartner study points out.

“As Kubernetes continues to go pervasive, a batch of teams find themselves astatine antithetic steps of their adoption, accomplishment set, oregon learning stage”

AKS Principal PM Lead Jorge Palma precocious posted. Gartner adjacent cautions enterprises against deploying instrumentality absorption “without heavy cognition of developer requirements.” 

Tools similar Copilot for Azure assistance developers bash much with Azure and AKS. Microsoft offers galore further resources to assistance developers—no substance wherever they are successful the adoption cycle. Here are conscionable a fewer ideas: 

• If you’re astatine the blank leafage stage, get real-world examples and solution ideas from our solution architectures.
• Explore Kubernetes solutions and services successful Azure Marketplace, wherever you tin find click-through deployments to the Kubernetes level and flexible billing models. 
• To get inspired, work however the improvement squad down Forza Horizon 5 converted services to AKS successful astir a month—without immoderate anterior Kubernetes experience—fueling the biggest archetypal week successful Xbox Games Studio history. 
• To boost skills, see 1 of the nonrecreational learning paths provided by Microsoft Learn, specified arsenic Introduction to Kubernetes connected Azure oregon Administer containers successful Azure.
• To enactment connected apical of your deployment, reappraisal these developer champion practices. 

Powering the AI gyration with AKS 

Generative AI continues to rocket crossed the landscape—and it’s often built connected apical of Kubernetes. Cloud-native and AI are moving unneurotic to substance innovation astatine scale, and AKS is portion of this gyration of intelligent apps. Developers tin physique apps successful AKS that consume Azure OpenAI Service arsenic portion of the architecture. 

AI applications often travel with bigger instrumentality images, truthful AKS precocious added artifact streaming. Container images tin beryllium streamed straight to the nodes wherever they’re moving a high-performance, on-demand protocol. That means pods are scheduled faster and commencement moving much quickly. 

AI applications besides propulsion the limits of scale, making outgo absorption a apical priority. Microsoft precocious announced that teams tin get much visibility and transparency into clump costs close successful the Azure portal. The cost investigation add-on for AKS (in preview) uses OpenCost to interruption down underlying clump infrastructure costs into circumstantial Kubernetes units, specified arsenic clump and namespace.

In addition, organizations tin tally specialized instrumentality learning workloads, similar ample connection models (LLMs), connected AKS much outgo efficaciously and with little manual configuration. The caller AI toolchain operator, a managed add-on based connected Kaito, simplifies the process of hosting and distributing open-source AI models and customized inferencing connected AKS clusters. Another enactment for improving clump ratio and costs is to usage the caller open-source supplier for moving Karpenter connected AKS. 

Microsoft besides precocious announced enactment for Kubernetes fleets, enabling level administrators to negociate aggregate AKS clusters astatine scale. Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager addresses the situation of staging updates crossed clusters successful a harmless and predictable way. 

DevOps makes the wheels spell round 

As the Gartner study explains, “the operation of DevOps and instrumentality exertion tin beryllium a almighty enabler for exertion improvement agility and speed, making DevOps skills the captious origin to deployment success.” DevOps drives prime and promotes consistency with provisioning and absorption practices, including continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

Yet gathering distributed applications tin inactive beryllium a analyzable business, which is wherefore the AKS squad continues to look for ways to assistance streamline this process. For example, Draft for AKS (in preview) helps streamline Kubernetes deployment, and caller smart defaults velocity up clump configuration. In June 2023, we added Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) APIs that assistance developers constitute and instrumentality simple, portable, resilient, and secured microservices. To automate builds and deploy them to AKS clusters, Azure Pipelines provides CI/CD. 

Developers utilizing Azure Container Apps volition find it adjacent easier to deploy codification to the unreality and to tally AI workloads. New “code-to-cloud” integrated unreality build productivity helps immoderate developer physique and tally their apps connected Azure Container Apps—no instrumentality cognition required. In addition, the precocious released landing portion accelerator provides a invaluable notation for builders of cloud-native apps and microservices. And for compute-heavy workloads, similar exemplary grooming and batch inferencing, dedicated GPU workload profiles (in preview) supply the power. 

Protecting everything 

According to Gartner, by 2026, the adoption of CSP-native platforms volition propel 75% of instrumentality instances to beryllium deployed wrong nationalist unreality environments, up from 50% successful 2023. At KubeCon and Ignite, we heard IT, ops, and cybersecurity experts from astir the satellite stock their attack to information successful the cloud. At Microsoft, we’re committed to providing our customers with the tools and resources they request to protect everything. For containers, that means information measures each on the pipeline—from improvement to runtime—and crossed hybrid and multicloud deployments.

At Ignite 2023, we announced that caller multicloud instrumentality information is coming soon to Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Defender cloud information posture management (CSPM) volition widen its precocious agentless scanning, data-aware information posture, unreality information graph, and onslaught way investigation capabilities to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), providing a azygous contextual presumption of unreality risks crossed Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, GCP, and hybrid environments. 

Security admins volition besides person amended visibility into the authorities of containerized applications truthful they tin prioritize misconfigurations and exposures successful their deployments of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and Google Kubernetes Engine clusters. 

The AKS documentation explains much security concepts for applications and clusters, and the Microsoft Security blog offers adept sum connected information matters.

Learn more 

• Learn much astir AKS and Azure Container Apps. 
• Learn much astir building intelligent apps connected Azure. 
• Dive into the AKS community connected YouTube, led by the AKS team. 

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*Gartner is simply a registered trademark and work people and Magic Quadrant is simply a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates successful the U.S. and internationally and are utilized herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. arsenic portion of a larger probe papers and should beryllium evaluated successful the discourse of the full document. The Gartner papers is disposable upon petition here. 

Gartner does not endorse immoderate vendor, product, oregon work depicted successful its probe publications, and does not counsel exertion users to prime lone those vendors with the highest ratings oregon different designation. Gartner probe publications dwell of the opinions of Gartner’s probe enactment and should not beryllium construed arsenic statements of fact. Gartner disclaims each warranties, expressed oregon implied, with respect to this research, including immoderate warranties of merchantability oregon fittingness for a peculiar purpose. 

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Container Management, By Dennis Smith, Wataru Katsurashima, Michael Warrilow, Tony Iams, Richard Watson, 20 September 2023.

The station Microsoft named a Leader successful the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management appeared archetypal connected Microsoft Azure Blog.