The complex work software developers do with container technology led Microsoft Corp. to release its Azure Connector Instances and, along with it, an ACI Connector for the Kubernetes container orchestration management system in July 2017. The ACI lets developers quickly craft and launch containerized applications, including from Kubernetes.

“This virtual Kubelet bridges the world of Kubernetes with the world of these new serverless containers runtimes like ACI,” said Gabe Monroy (pictured), principal program manager of containers at Microsoft Azure.

Monroy spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas.

Gaining customer attraction

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. Part of Monroy’s work involves creating managed Kubernetes clusters. Microsoft Azure has streamlined ease of use and bringing benefits of serverless and what Monroy described as marrying Azure Container Service, which manages a hosted Kubernetes environment, with ACIs “to get to a place of a Kubernetes environment where there’s no virtual machines associated with it.”

So far, Kubernetes is making an impact on Microsoft’s customers’ needs. “The main thing is agility. People want to move faster, so that’s the main benefit that we hear,” Monroy said.

Several Azure-hosted services, like Open Service Broker, bridges Kubernetes with Azure data services, Monroy explained, adding that Azure offers service-level agreements, backup, disaster recovery, restore and security features.

“We ship a Helm Chart, Helm install in WordPress, and it will install in Kubernetes the same way you would a container system. And behind the scenes, it uses the broker to spit up a MySQL and dynamically attach it,” Monroy stated as an example of how the Kubernetes ecosystem is evolving.

On the operations side, he believes Kubernetes plays an important role in cloud-native storage, AI research company OpenAI and deep learning.

“Things are moving fast, and customers want what we’re building. I’m dealing with enterprises who want cloud products. … In general, I think this whole space is approaching a level of enterprise friendliness and enterprise hardiness where we want to start adding governance, and adding security, and adding role-based access controls across the board, and really making it palatable to the high-trust environment,” Monroy concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE