Microsoft brings more of its Azure services to any Kubernetes cluster

At its Build developer conference today, Microsoft announced a new set of Azure services (in preview) that businesses can now run on virtually any CNCF-conformant Kubernetes cluster with the help of its Azure Arc multi-cloud service.

Azure Arc, similar to tools like Google's Anthos or AWS's upcoming EKS Anywhere, provides businesses with a single tool to manage their container clusters across clouds and on-premises data centers. Since its launch back in late 2019, Arc enabled some of the core Azure services to run directly in these clusters as well, though the early focus was on a small set of data services, with the team also later adding some machine learning tools to Arc as well. With today's update, the company is greatly expanding this set of containerized Azure services that work with Arc.

These new services include Azure App Service for building and managing web apps and APIs, Azure Functions for event-driven programming, Azure Logic Apps for building automated workflows, Azure Event Grid for event routing, and Azure API Management for... you guessed it... managing internal and external APIs.

The app services are now Azure Arc-enabled, which means customers can deploy Web Apps, Functions, API gateways, Logic Apps and Event Grid services on pre-provisioned Kubernetes clusters," Microsoft explained in its annual Book of News" for this year's Build. This takes advantage of features including deployment slots for A/B testing, storage queue triggers and out-of-box connectors from the app services, regardless of run location. With these portable turnkey services, customers can save time building apps, then manage them consistently across hybrid and multicloud environments using Azure Arc."