With a many lines of YAML, Calico will keep watch as you make operation- controlled networking.

One of the intriguing aspects of moving to a top-down, operation-centric way of working is redefining how we do networking. Important as the operation model first abstracted down physical structure with virtualization and is now using Kubernetes and analogous unity tools to epitome down the underpinning virtual machines, networking is moving down from general- purpose routed protocol heaps to software- driven networking that uses common protocols to apply operation-specific network functions.

We can see how networking is evolving with Windows Garçon 2022’s preface of SMB over QUIC as an volition to general- purpose VPNs for train sharing between on- demesne Azure Mound systems and the Azure public pall. Also, in Kubernetes, we ’re seeing technologies similar as service mesh give an operation- defined networking model that delivers network morass with your distributed operation as part of the operation description rather than as a network that an operation uses.

A new networking subcaste operation- defined networking

This operation- driven networking is a logical extension of important of the software- defined networking model that underpins the public pall. Still, rather of taking deep understanding of networking and, more importantly, network tackle, it’s a shift to a advanced- position approach where a network is automatically stationed using the intents in policy and rules. The shift down from both the virtual and the physical is essential when we ’re working with stoutly tone-orchestrating operations that gauge up and down on demand, with cases across multiple regions and topographies all part of the same operation.

It’s still early days for operation- driven networking, but we ’re seeing tools appear in Azure as part of its Kubernetes perpetration. One option is the Open Service Mesh, of course, but there’s another set of tools that helps manage the network security of our Kubernetes operations Network Policy. This helps manage connectivity between the colorful factors of a Kubernetes operation, handling business inflow between capsules.

Network programs in Azure Kubernetes Service

AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) offers network policy support through two routes its own native tool or the community- developed Calico. This alternate option is maybe the most intriguing, as it gives you across-cloud tool that can work not only with AKS, but also with your own on- demesne Kubernetes, Red Hat’s Open Shift, and numerous other Kubernetes executions.

Calico is managed by Kubernetes security and operation company Tigera. It's an open source perpetration of the Kubernetes network policy specification, handling connectivity between workloads and administering security programs on those connections, adding its own extensions to the base Kubernetes functions. It’s designed to work using different data aeroplanes, from eBPF on Linux to Windows Host Networking. This approach makes it ideal for Azure, which offers Kubernetes support for both Linux and Windows holders.

Setting up network policy in AKS is important. By dereliction, all capsules can shoot data anywhere. Although this is n’t innately insecure, it does open up your cluster to the possibility of concession. Capsules containing back- end services are open to the outside world, allowing anyone to pierce your services. Enforcing a network policy allows you to insure that those back- end services are only accessible by frontal- end systems, reducing threat by controlling business.

Whether using the native service or Calico, AKS network programs are YAML documents that define the rules used to route business between capsules. You can make those programs part of the overall overload for your operation, defining your network with your operation description. This allows the network to gauge with the operation, adding or removing capsules as AKS responds to changes in cargo (or if you ’re using it with KEDA (Kubernetes- grounded Event- Driven Autoscaling), as your operation responds to events).

Using Calico in Azure Kubernetes Service

Choosing a network policy tool must be done at cluster creation; you ca n’t change the tool you ’re using once it’s been stationed. There are differences between the AKS native perpetration and its Calico support. Both apply the Kubernetes specification, and both run on Linux AKS clusters, but only Calico has support for Windows holders. It’s important to note that although Calico will work in AKS, there’s no sanctioned Azure support for Calico beyond the being community options.

Getting started with Calico in AKS is fairly simple. First, produce an AKS cluster and add the Azure Container Networking draw-in to your cluster. This can host either AKS network policy or Calico. Next, set up your virtual network with any subnets you plan to use. Once you have this in place, all you need to do is use the Azure command line to produce an AKS cluster, setting your network policy to “ calico” rather than “ azure.” This enables Calico support on both Linux and Windows not pools.However, make sure to register Calico support using the EnableAKSWindowsCalico point flag from the Azure CLI, If you’re using Windows.

The Calico platoon recommends installing the calicoctl operation tool in your cluster. There are several different options for installation running binaries under Windows or Linux or adding a Kubernetes cover to your cluster. This last option is presumably stylish for working with AKS as you can also mix and match Windows and Linux capsules in your cluster and manage both from the same Kubernetes terrain.

Structure and planting Calico network programs

You’ll produce Calico network programs using YAML, setting programs for capsules with specific places. These places are applied as cover markers when creating the cover, and your rules will need a chooser to attach your policy to the capsules that meet your app and part markers. Once you’ve created a policy, use kubectl to apply it to your cluster.

Rules are easy enough to define. You can set doorway programs for specific capsules to, say, only admit business from another set of capsules that match another chooser pattern. This way you can ensure your operation back end, say, only receives business from your frontal end, and that your data service only works when addressed by your aft end. The performing simple set of doorway rules ensures insulation between operation categories as part of your operation description. Other options allow you to define rules for namespaces as well as places, icing separation between the product and test capsules.

Calico gives you fine-granulated control over your operation network policy. You can manage anchorages, specific operation endpoints, protocols, and indeed IP performances. Your programs can be applied to a specific namespace or encyclopedically across your Kubernetes case. Rules are set for doorway and exit, allowing you to control the inflow of business in and out of your capsules, with programs denying all business piecemeal from what's specifically allowed. With Calico, there’s enough inflexibility to snappily make complex network security models with a sprinkle of simple YAML lines. Just produce the YAML you need and use calicoctl to apply your rules.

Operation-driven networking is an important concept that allows operation development brigades to control how their law interacts with the underpinning network fabric. Like storehouse and — thanks to tools like Kubernetes — cipher, the capability to treat networking as a fabric that can be simply controlled at a connection position is important. Networking brigades no longer have to configure operation networks; all they need to do is help define VNets and also leave the operation programs up to the operation.

Still, in ultramodern operations, we need to take advantage of tools similar to Calico, If we’re to make flexible. It may be a change in how we suppose about networks, but it’s an essential one to support ultramodern operation architectures.

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The software vendor's cloud customers in Southeast Asia now can tap its Azure Availability Zones in Singapore, giving them access to a region with at least three separate physical data locations.

Microsoft has added Southeast Asia as an Azure Availability Zone, enabling customers in the region to access its cloud services which are hosted on at least three separate physical data locations.

Served out of its Azure Region in Singapore, the expanded cloud zones are now "generally available" to the Southeast Asia Azure region, Microsoft's Singapore cloud and enterprise lead Patrik Bihammar said in a blog post on Monday.

According to the software vendor, Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region, with each comprising of at least one datacentre equipped with its own independent power, cooling, and networking.

To ensure resiliency, Bihammar said, a minimum of three separate zones have been established in all the enabled regions, a move that aims to safeguard applications and data from datacentre failures.

He added that this further strengthens Microsoft's cloud capabilities to meet the needs of customers in both the public and private sectors, as well as provide a portfolio to support customers in the development of applications for their business continuity and disaster recovery efforts.

"By building application architecture using a combination of Availability Zones with Azure region pairs, customers can synchronously replicate applications and data using Availability Zones within an Azure region for high-availability within Singapore, and asynchronously replicate across Azure regions for geographic disaster recovery protection," he explained.

Microsoft's cloud environments adhere to several certification requirements, including Level 3 of the Multi-Tier Cloud Security (MTCS) Standard for Singapore, which is a cloud security standard that cuts across multiple tiers of cloud security.

The US software vendor currently operates 54 Azure regions worldwide.

Other cloud players also have been talking up their plans to expand in the Asia-Pacific region, including Google, which recently announced plans to open new cloud regions in Osaka and Hong Kong, bringing its total to seven by early-2019. Google in May added its third cloud zone in Singapore and later, in August, said it was building its third data center in the city-state.

Alibaba Group has also been ramping up its cloud action, launching a slew of cloud products for the global market in August 2018 and earmarking Asia-Pacific as a priority region for growth. Of the Chinese vendor's 10 international datacentre regions, eight are located in Asia-Pacific including Singapore, Australia, Indonesia, and Malaysia. It also operates eight regions in China.

Microsoft will no longer support its Azure Container Service (ACS) as of January 31, 2020. For Kubernetes users, the Microsoft way forward is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Microsoft will cease supporting its Azure Container Service (ACS) as of January 31, 2020, officials revealed last week. ACS is being replaced by Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), which the company introduced in 2017.

Microsoft's ACS for developing, deploying and maintaining containers has supported Kubernetes -- an open-source container-orchestration standard -- since early 2017.

Because of Kubernetes' success, Microsoft added a dedicated Kubernetes container service, AKS, in the Fall of 2017. At the time Microsoft introduced AKS, officials said they planned to continue to offer ACS, originally introduced in 2015. In March 2018, however, Microsoft officials said they would be deprecating ACS at some point, but didn't provide a specific date.

On December 5, Microsoft officials said in a blog post that ACS will no longer be supported as of January 31, 2020. Beginning on that date, all ACS application programming interfaces (APIs) will be blocked. Users will no longer be able to create new clusters, or update or scale existing clusters. They will be able to list and delete existing clusters.

Microsoft's recommendations for existing ACS users are to migrate to AKS or the ask-engine open-source project if they use Kubernetes. If they use ACS with Docker, Microsoft suggests moving to the Basic or Standard/Advanced Docker Enterprise Edition for Azure solution template. If they use ACS with DC/OS, the company is advocating users move to the Mesosphere DC/OS Enterprise or Mesosphere DC/OS Open Source solution template.

Last week, Microsoft made available a public preview of AKS virtual nodes, which brings together the container-based compute capacity of Azure Container Instances and the Kubernetes API provided by AKS. The combination brings the benefits of serverless computing to the Kubernetes API, Microsoft officials said.

Microsoft launched Azure in October 2008. In the ensuing decade, Microsoft's cloud platform has come a long way from its 'Red Dog' beginnings.

Ten years ago this week at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2008 in Los Angeles, Microsoft officially launched its Azure cloud platform. Since then, some of the associated product names have morphed and some, but not all, of Microsoft's plans for it have materialized. But Azure undeniably has become a core Microsoft service over time.

When Microsoft originally outlined what was then known as "Windows Azure," many of us thought of it as an adaptation of Windows Server that Microsoft would run in its own datacenters. (Not a bad first attempt at a description, in my view.)

The Azure operating system, codenamed "Red Dog" -- and named after a seedy club in Silicon Valley -- was designed by a team of Microsoft OS experts including Dave Cutler, the father of VMS and Windows NT. (Fun fact: The Azure team at PDC wore red shoes as a tribute to the Red Dog name.)

I explained the OS piece this way back in 2008:

"Red Dog is what networks and manages the set of Windows Server 2008 machines that comprise the Microsoft-hosted cloud. At the highest level, Red Dog consists of four 'pillars': Storage (like a file system); the 'fabric controller,' which is a management system for modeling/deploying and provisioning; virtualized computation/VM; and a development environment, which allows developers to emulate Red Dog on their desktosp and plug in Visual Studio, Eclipse or other tools to write cloud apps against it. The way Red Dog is architected is Microsoft only has to deploy Red Dog on a single machine and then multiple instances of it can be duplicated on the rest of the servers in the cloud using virtualization technology."

Of these four pillars, the fabric controller was/is the secret sauce, according to Cutler, who spoke with me via an email exchange. Cutler said:

"The one component that we think provides RD (Red Dog) with a significant advantage is the fabric controller. The fabric controller owns all the resources in the entire cloud and runs on a subset of nodes in a durable cluster. It manages the placement, provisioning, updating, patching, capacity, load balancing, and scale out of nodes in the cloud all without any operational intervention."

Over time, Microsoft ended up decoupling "Windows" from the "Azure" name. It still hasn't moved some of its key cloud services, including Office 365, to run on Azure, as planned. (Some newer Office 365 services do run on Azure, but not the core services like Exchange, SharePoint, etc.) And after initially denying plans to allow customers to host Azure in their own data centers, Microsoft ended up releasing Azure Stack, an Azure appliance platform, which does that very thing.

It's easy to forget, but Microsoft originally launched Azure as a Platform-as-a-Service play only. Later, officials saw the money -- and potentially the low-hanging customer fruit -- was in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service space. That's when Microsoft began offering Linux on Azure. Currently half of Azure VMs are running Linux, not Windows Server.

By most industry accounts, Microsoft is currently the No. 2 cloud vendor, after Amazon. There are hundreds of services currently available on Azure. Microsoft operates 54 Azure regions worldwide. Azure is a key component of Microsoft' "Commercial Cloud" revenue stream (though Microsoft continues not to say how much of that now more-than-$30 billion annual Commercial Cloud run rate is attributable to Azure).



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The most popular operating system on Microsoft's Azure cloud today is - drumroll please - Linux.

Three years ago, Mark Russinovich, CTO ofAzure, Microsoft's cloud program, said, "One in four [Azure] instances is Linux." Then, in 2017, it was 40 percent Azure virtual machines (VM) were Linux. Today, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group, said in an interview, "it's about half now, but it varies on the day because a lot of these workloads are elastic, but sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux." Microsoft later clarified, "about half Azure VMs are Linux."

That's right. Microsoft's prize cloud, Linux, not Windows Server, is now, at least some of the time, the most popular operating system. Windows Server isn't going to be making a come back.

You see as Guthrie added, "Every month, Linux goes up."

And it's not just Azure users who are turning to Linux.

"Native Azure services are often running on Linux," Guthrie added. "Microsoft is building more of these services. For example, Azure's Software Defined Network (SDN) is based on Linux."

It's not just on Azure that Microsoft is embracing Linux.

"Look at our simultaneous release of SQL Server on Linux. All of our projects now run on Linux," Guthrie said.

WHY IS MICROSOFT JOINING THE MOVE TO LINUX?

As Russinovich said years ago, when Microsoft started its turn toward open-source software and Linux, it's being done because it's a "practical business decision."

And that's because, as Microsoft CTO of Data Raghu Ramakrishnan recently explained, "We meet customers where they are, and in particular if you want Linux we'll give you Linux; if you want MySQL, well we'll give you MySQL; you want NoSQL well we'll give you NoSQL -- that means you need to be part of open source; open source by nature is a community thing."

Guthrie expanded:

"It started more than 10 years ago when we open-sourced ASP.NET. We recognized open source is something that every developer can benefit from. It's not nice, it's essential. It's not just code, it's community. We don't just throw the code on a website, now we publish our roadmap and work with outside contributors."

For example, Guthrie added:

"There are now more than 20,000 Microsoft employees on GitHub. We now have over 200 open-source projects. We're now the largest open-source project supporter in the world."
That's a long way from former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who said, "Linux is cancer." But even Ballmer, who's departed Microsoft's helm five years ago, now said he loves Linux.

So, which Linux does Microsoft and its Azure customers love today? Guthrie wouldn't say, but added, "Microsoft has close relationships with Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical."

There are now at least eight Linux distros available on Azure. Whatever Linux you use, Microsoft and Guthrie want you to know you'll have their full support on Azure.


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Microsoft is planning to bring its Cosmos DB NoSQL database to its hybrid-computing and secure microcontroller platforms as part of its 'intelligent cloud, intelligent edge' strategy.

Three months after acquiring GitHub, Microsoft is rebranding and repositioning its VSTS coding collaboration service as 'Azure DevOps,'

• Azure Pipelines: CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) services that can work with any language, platform or cloud and connect to GitHub or any other Git repository. ("If you want to use Azure Pipelines to build and test a Node service from a repo in GitHub and deploy it to a container in AWS, go for it," according to Microsoft's blog post.)
• Azure Boards: Work tracking with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, reports.
• Azure Artifacts: Maven, npm and NuGet package feeds from public and private sources.
• Azure Repos: Cloud-hosted private Git repos.
• Azure Test Plans: Planned and exploratory testing solutions.
• VSTS currently includes CI/CD, Boards, package management, Git integration and testing and a bunch of other collaboration, administration, and additional services.

"VSTS and TFS are stronger with the addition of GitHub. Some customers prefer a simple integrated solution, others want to adopt DevOps tools incrementally, assembling tailored solutions. For years, we've been adding extensibility and integration capabilities into the product. Today both VSTS and TFS integrate with GitHub and that integration will continue to deepen. GitHub offers a great developer social platform and version control system with broad developer appeal. VSTS has a wide range of DevOps services that scale to the largest enterprises. Together, teams can get the best of both worlds, selecting the pieces they want."

Microsoft's service for bringing computing and artificial intelligence processing to IoT devices, Azure IoT Edge, is rolling out globally.

Admins can now significantly reduce the risk of accounts being compromised by password-spraying attacks.

An Eclipse Foundation IoT developer survey reveals how AWS and Microsoft are widening an early IoT lead potentially at the expense of Google Cloud Platform.

• Time series data is the most collected data type followed by device information and log data.
• The top IoT concerns were security, data collection, and analytics, connectivity and hardware integration.
• IoT platforms are being built the most followed by home automation systems and industrial automation. Smart cities, energy management, and agriculture rounded out the top 6.
• Raspbian, Ubuntu, and Debian were the top IoT operating systems and Linux distros. Linux was used by 71.8 percent of respondents in IoT devices.
• Java is the programming language of choice in IoT. Milinkovich noted that IoT programming languages shouldn't be fancy so that means traditional methods in many cases. "There's no compelling rationale for a new programming language for IoT," he said. "When dealing with gateways and clouds you're looking into the skillsets of what developers have today. Inserting something new isn't going to help."

The tech giant now boasts four Azure regions in Australia, with its latest, Azure Australia Central, allowing organizations to collocate legacy and modern applications.

Microsoft is adding Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack options for its US government customers. But there's still no definite date when Teams support will be added for government users.

Axon reported strong fourth quarter results and detailed a December migration to Microsoft Azure as well as other cloud-centric implementations.

Apple has been using Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's S3 to store encrypted portions of some iOS files for the past few years. But Apple is now using Google Cloud for some storage needs.

Apple has been using Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's S3 to store encrypted portions of some iOS files for the past few years. But Apple is now using Google Cloud for some storage needs.