Microsoft announces Azure Hybrid Benefit and Kubernetes changes ahead of KubeCon

Microsoft announced Kubernetes and Azure Hybrid Benefit updates in conjunction with the start of this week's KubeCon North America event . Microsoft is also set to host Open Azure Day on Wednesday, November 18th.

According to Azure Compute CVP Brendan Burns, Microsoft has worked closely with Red Hat to develop Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaler (KEDA), expanding it into a community project. The 2.0 release is generally available with improvements to the ScaledObject KEDA resource, together with scalers to integrate KEDA with different workflows.

Microsoft is deploying Kubernetes version 1.19, adding hardened images to meet security benchmarks. The Xbox team uses AKS for latency-sensitive workloads related to its Project xCloud initiative. The Azure team added maxSurge, in general availability, which uses multiple buffer nodes to replace older nodes, reducing upgrade latency and disruptions. Additionally, Microsoft now supports ephemeral disks for AKS and together with container integrations.

Product marketing director David Dennis noted the GA of Hybrid Benefit functionality for Linux customers.