Today we’re announcing support for Microsoft’s recently-released Microsoft Azure Linux container host for Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), an open-source Linux distribution developed to serve as the base container operating system for Azure services. It provides lightweight, fine-tuned support for container workloads for more optimized AKS performance.
This new platform allows you to deploy and manage container workloads with the same tooling used by many of Microsoft’s own services. New Relic support of Azure Linux gives you full observability into your clusters using our Kubernetes monitoring UI, so you can benefit from the reliability and security of Azure’s frequently-tested software supply chain to deploy and manage your AKS applications.
“With Microsoft Azure Linux, customers see benefit from the value of having a secure, performant, and fully native AKS container host. Microsoft controls the supply chain for Azure Linux end to end, resulting in a more streamlined image tailored and optimized for AKS. Azure Linux provides a consistent K8s experience throughout the developer and production lifecycle coupled with the level of support you expect from Microsoft.”
Improve cluster reliability and security
The Azure Linux container host includes only the bare essentials to run AKS for a more efficient user experience. The reduced number of dependencies and overall smaller footprint minimizes the number of update interruptions and improves reboot speeds. This minimalist design also affords security advantages. Removing window managers and graphical interfaces reduces the attack surface area, and fewer packages in the container host mean security issues occur less frequently and are patched more quickly.
With Microsoft sourcing and verifying each package running with Azure Linux container host on AKS, you can count on enhanced container operations with dependable components. If you’re using AKS, you’ll recognize the same container host across cloud and edge scenarios like Azure Arc or AKS-HCI. This consistency helps simplify host management, making it easier to adapt workloads to take advantage of hybrid cloud functionality.
Stay on top of AKS cluster health
New Relic provides a single source of truth for all of your Kubernetes telemetry data, including your metrics, logs, and traces from every part of your Kubernetes stack. With support for the Azure Linux container host, our Kubernetes and Pixie solutions offer full visibility into AKS performance:
- See everything in your clusters, from apps to infrastructure, with platform-wide observability.
- Correlate cluster and workload performance to understand how nodes, pods, containers, and applications impact each other, and analyze workload performance across all your clusters in a single, curated UI.
- Easily analyze cluster events to identify and resolve errors quickly, and get real-time alerts with an activity stream for events and critical issues.
- Get resource health at a glance with color-coded UIs and preconfigured alerting, and track cluster resources including CPU, storage, and networking across nodes and pods.
Next steps
- To get started using the Azure Linux container host for AKS, check out these Microsoft resources on creating a cluster with Azure Linux, adding an Azure Linux node pool, and migrating Ubuntu nodes to Azure Linux.
- New Relic Customers: To get started monitoring Kubernetes, install our Kubernetes integration. Learn more by reading our three-part guide on monitoring Kubernetes for total infrastructure observability.
- New to New Relic: Haven’t signed up for your New Relic full-access user account yet? Create a free account and you’ll get 100 GB/month of free data ingest and access to our platform’s 30+ capabilities including popular tools like APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs management, custom dashboards, errors inbox, tracing, change tracking, and more.
The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of New Relic. Any solutions offered by the author are environment-specific and not part of the commercial solutions or support offered by New Relic. Please join us exclusively at the Explorers Hub (discuss.newrelic.com) for questions and support related to this blog post. This blog may contain links to content on third-party sites. By providing such links, New Relic does not adopt, guarantee, approve or endorse the information, views or products available on such sites.
