Windows AKS partner solutions

Microsoft collaborates with partners to ensure your build, test, deployment, configuration, and monitoring of your applications perform optimally with Windows containers on AKS.

Our third party partners featured in this article have introduction guides to help you start using their solutions with your applications running on Windows containers on AKS.

Solutions	Partners
DevOps	GitLab CircleCI
Networking	NGINX Calico
Observability	Datadog New Relic
Security	Prisma Cloud
Storage	NetApp
Config Management	Chef

DevOps

DevOps streamlines the delivery process, improves collaboration across teams, and enhances software quality, ensuring swift, reliable, and continuous deployment of your Windows-based applications.

GitLab

The GitLab DevSecOps Platform supports the Microsoft development ecosystem with performance, accessibility testing, SAST, DAST and Fuzzing security scanning, dependency scanning, SBOM, license management and more.

As an extensible platform, GitLab also allows you to plug in your own tooling for any stage. GitLab's integration with Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) enables full DevSecOps workflows for Windows and Linux Container workloads using either Push CD or GitOps Pull CD with flux manifests. Using Cloud Native Buildpaks, GitLab Auto DevOps can build, test, and autodeploy OSS .NET projects.

To learn more, please our see our joint blog.

CircleCI

CircleCI’s integration with Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) allows you to automate, build, validate, and ship containerized Windows applications, ensuring faster and more reliable software deployment. You can easily integrate your pipeline with AKS using CircleCI orbs, which are prepacked snippets of YAML configuration.

Follow this tutorial to learn how to set up a CI/CD pipeline to build a Dockerized ASP.NET application and deploy it to an AKS cluster.

Networking

Ensure efficient traffic management, enhanced security, and optimal network performance with these solutions to achieve smooth application connectivity and communication.

F5 NGINX

NGINX Ingress Controller deployed in AKS, on-premises, and in the cloud implements unified Kubernetes-native API gateways, load balancers, and Ingress controllers to reduce complexity, increase uptime, and provide in-depth insights into app health and performance for containerized Windows workloads.

Running at the edge of a Kubernetes cluster, NGINX Ingress Controller ensures holistic app security with user and service identities, authorization, access control, encrypted communications, and other NGINX App Protect modules for Layer 7 WAF and DoS app protection.

Learn how to manage connectivity to your Windows applications running on Windows nodes in a mixed-node AKS cluster with NGINX Ingress controller in this blog.

Calico

Tigera provides an active security platform with full-stack observability for containerized workloads and Microsoft AKS as a fully managed SaaS (Calico Cloud) or a self-managed service (Calico Enterprise). The platform prevents, detects, troubleshoots, and automatically mitigates exposure risks of security breaches for workloads in Microsoft AKS.

Its open-source offering, Calico Open Source, is the most widely adopted container networking and security solution. It specifies security and observability as code to ensure consistent enforcement of security policies, which enables DevOps, platform, and security teams to protect workloads, detect threats, achieve continuous compliance, and troubleshoot service issues in real-time.

For more information, see Securing Windows workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service with Calico.

Observability

Observability provides deep insights into your systems, enabling rapid issue detection and resolution to enhance your application’s reliability and performance.

Datadog

Datadog is the essential monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. We bring together end-to-end traces, metrics, and logs to make your applications, infrastructure, and third-party services entirely observable. Partner with Datadog for Windows on AKS environments to streamline monitoring, proactively resolve issues, and optimize application performance and availability.

Get started by following the recommendations in our joint blog.

New Relic

New Relic's Azure Kubernetes integration is a powerful solution that seamlessly connects New Relic's monitoring and observability capabilities with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). By deploying the New Relic Kubernetes integration, users gain deep insights into their AKS clusters' performance, health, and resource utilization. This integration allows users to efficiently manage and troubleshoot containerized applications, optimize resource allocation, and proactively identify and resolve issues in their AKS environments. With New Relic's comprehensive monitoring and analysis tools, businesses can ensure the smooth operation and optimal performance of their Kubernetes workloads on Azure.

Check this blog for detailed information.

Security

Ensure the integrity and confidentiality of applications, thereby fostering trust and compliance across your infrastructure.

Prisma Cloud

Prisma Cloud is a comprehensive Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) tailor-made to help secure Windows containers on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Gain continuous real-time visibility and control over Windows container environments, including vulnerability and compliance management, identities and permissions, and AI-assisted runtime defense. Integrated container scanning across the pipeline and in Azure Container Registry ensure security throughout the entire application lifecycle.

See our guidance for more details.

Storage

Storage enables standardized and seamless storage interactions, ensuring high application performance and data consistency.

NetApp

Astra provides dynamic storage provisioning for stateful workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). It also provides data protection using snapshots and clones. Provision SMB volumes through the Kubernetes control plane, making storage seamless and on-demand for all your Windows AKS workloads.

Follow the steps provided in this blog post to dynamically provision SMB volumes for Windows AKS workloads.

Config management

Automate and standardize the system settings across your environments to enhance efficiency, reduce errors, and ensuring system stability and compliance.

Chef

Chef provides visibility and threat detection from build to runtime that monitors, audits, and remediates the security of your Azure cloud services and Kubernetes and Windows container assets. Chef provides comprehensive visibility and continuous compliance into your cloud security posture and helps limit the risk of misconfigurations in cloud-native environments by providing best practices based on CIS, STIG, SOC2, PCI-DSS and other benchmarks. This is part of a broader compliance offering that supports on-premises or hybrid cloud environments including applications deployed on the edge.

To learn more about Chef’s capabilities, check out the comprehensive ‘how-to’ blog post here: Securing Your Windows Environments Running on Azure Kubernetes Service with Chef.