After announcing the serverless and DevOps capabilities for Kubernetes community, Microsoft has now shifted its focus to the Kubernetes ecosystem and has announced collaboration with Heptio and Tigera.
Heptio will bring its Kubernetes disaster recovery and migration solutions to Azure with Heptio Ark, while Microsoft and Tigera will jointly contribute to Project Calico, to simplify network security for Windows Containers.
Heptio Ark
Ark project works through Kubernetes API, and is a solution for managing backups and disaster recovery. It’s also a useful source to move workloads across on-premise and public cloud environments.
These capabilities of Ark will be available to Azure customers, and will help them not only backup and restore content in AKS (Azure Container Service), but also the snapshots that are created using ark will persist in Azure and will be encrypted at rest.
Calico
Calico, the community-based, free and open source solution, is maintained by Tigera, and enables developers and DevOps teams to easily manage the configuration and security of Kubernetes-managed networks and services.
As a part of the partnership, Microsoft will contribute code for Calico data plane driver (Felix), and Tigera will extend the functionality of Calico to support Widows Server version 1709.
It will help the users running mixed OS (Linux and Windows) Kubernetes clusters to define and manage network policies consistently, as well as securing the containerized applications and microservices.
Microsoft said that Calico for Windows will work for both on-premises and cloud environments, including Azure Container Service through ACS-Engine.
Additionally, Microsoft is shipping beta support for Windows Server Containers in Kubernetes 1.9, which will expand the Kubernetes capabilities to the enterprises who invested in .NET and Windows applications.
Also read: Microsoft Azure adds DevOps and Serverless capabilities to Kubernetes community
Currently, the support for Calico on Windows is at beta-level. Microsoft and Tigera are still working on it to conduct trials over the coming months, and expect to make it generally available in first half of 2018.
