At the Microsoft Build 2022 conference, Microsoft today announced that Azure Container Apps, a serverless computing framework based on Kubernetes, is now generally available.

At the same time, Microsoft revealed it has extended Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) by adding support for an open source Draft 2 tool that provides a revamped Draft Azure command line interface (CLI) in addition to an Azure portal, Visual Studio Code extensions and the ability to generate a GitHub Actions workflow file that can be used to build and deploy applications on any Kubernetes cluster. There is also now a web application routing add-in that exposes web applications deployed on Kubernetes to the internet and an add-in to the Kubernetes-based Event-Driven Autoscaler (KEDA) that makes it easier to scale container applications.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told conference attendees that Azure Container Apps makes it possible to build microservices-based cloud-native applications with no Kubernetes experience required.

Microsoft also announced it has added a landing zone accelerator that provides best practices and automated reference implementations to Azure Arc, a control plane for managing Kubernetes clusters. In addition, a Business Critical service tier for Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance improves business continuity, adds continuous security to deliver rolling patches and improves overall performance.

Nadella also described how IT teams will be able to take advantage of the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of the Microsoft Azure Cloud to infuse cloud-native applications with AI inference capabilities. Those capabilities can be deployed at the network edge to create what Microsoft describes as a hybrid loop to integrate AI models trained in the cloud with inference engines running anywhere.

In general, microservices are now the default approach for building any cloud application, says Nadella. Developers can choose between Azure Container Apps to take advantage of a serverless computing framework built on top of KEDA, the distributed application runtime (Dapr) and Envoy proxy software running on a distribution of Kubernetes hosted on Linux servers. Or, they can opt to rely on the managed AKS service that Microsoft provides to retain more operational control, he says. On either platform, Microsoft is making it clear that most new cloud applications will be based on a microservices architecture.

Microsoft, of course, is hoping that as many of those applications as possible will be built on the Azure cloud. The shift to microservices represents a significant opportunity to regain ground lost to Amazon Web Services in the first era of the cloud. As organizations shift toward replacing legacy approaches based on monolithic architectures, it creates an opportunity for Microsoft to make the case that organizations should switch to Azure.

It’s not clear just how many—or to what degree—developers will employ Azure to build microservices-based applications, but as it becomes simpler to construct them the total number of developers building those types of applications will undoubtedly increase in the months and years ahead. The challenge then becomes how to manage all the dependencies that will inevitably arise as more applications start to share access to microservices across what has become a highly distributed computing environment.

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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