My MicroK8s Cluster Is Now Manged by Azure. What is next?

In a previous blog series MicroK8S and WSL Managed by Azure Arc - A blog series about my experiences with MicroK8S, WSL, and Azure Arc I had a curiosity to see if I could deploy MicroK8s on my WIndows 10 WSL instance and then manage the WSL instance with Azure Arc and then manage the MicroK8s cluster using Arc-enabled Kubernetes.

So let’s refresh here a little. I was able to get a MicroK8s cluster deployed on WSL running on my Windows 10 laptop. I was able to get the Azure Arc Agent (Azure Connected Machine Agent) connected and now my WSL instance is a managed Azure resource using Azure Arc-enabled Servers. Last but not least, I was able to get the MicroK8s cluster connected using Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes as well. So now, I want to discuss some of the things we can do with that Kubernetes cluster now that it is being manged by Azure.

To start, let me share the Microsoft Learn Document What is Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes so we are all on the same page when it comes to what it is and what it can do.

At a high level there is a lot of Azure Services we can integrate and use with our Kubernetes clusters running anywhere, such as on-premises, or even GCP and AWS. As long as we can manage them using Azure Arc there is a good number of Azure tools and services we now have access to. Here is a short list of things I will try to blog about here:

• Deploying Configurations using GitOps
• Azure Resource Graph Queries
• Identity and Access Management
• Installing Cluster Extensions
• Monitor our Cluster using Azure Monitor Container Insights (Prometheus, and Grafana)
• Access Secrets from an Azure Key Vault
• Policy Enforcements using Azure Policy
• Threat Protection using Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Deploy Azure Arc-enabled Open Service Mesh
• Azure Machine Learning for Kubernetes
• Event Grid on Kubernetes
• Azure Arc-enabled Data Services

These are some but not all of the things I would love to dig in and blog about here. It may be multiple blogs. I do want to cover Monitoring our cluster using Azure Monitor Container Insights, Azure Policy, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud for sure in this series. Some of the solutions I would not be able to deploy on my little single node cluster running on WSL. So I may end up blogging about those services with MicroK8s running on a VM running within Azure Stack HCI or something fun.

So join me on this next adventure. My first blog that I will attempt to write is Monitor our Cluster using Azure Monitor Container Insights with some mention about Prometheus nad Managed Grafana.