Microsoft has starting referring to itself as a three-cloud company. There’s the Xbox gaming cloud, Microsoft 365 productivity services, and, first and foremost, Azure. Number two behind Amazon Web Services, Azure is a hyperscale behemoth, rolling out service after service at a rate that’s hard to keep up with. That rapid cadence is even more visible during Microsoft’s three main developer events, and you sometimes have to delve into the flurry of announcements to understand the key elements.
It’s clear that Microsoft’s focus is on Azure as a platform for building serverless applications, offering infrastructure services that don’t require specifying virtual machines, and that charge by the second of CPU used. A wide variety of platform services sits under your applications, providing machine learning, analytics, storage, and compute.
Things get really interesting where the two meet: a point that starts to improve scalability for our code, within single Azure regions or across the entire Azure public cloud. Building distributed applications by hand isn’t easy, and Microsoft provides more ways to automate scalability, using a mix of familiar tools and new features.
Event-driven scaling in Kubernetes
Azure, like the other big public clouds, is hugely dependent on Kubernetes. Managing and orchestrating distributed applications is essential when you’re working with hyperscale compute, and where delivering applications in isolated containers simplifies the process of delivering a complete infrastructure from your build system.
