The case study says that Microsoft is using Windows containers running on the company’s Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to accomplish at least some of this work. Microsoft’s goals in moving more of its own services to Azure include better resiliency, scalability, automation, security, cost reduction and alignment of code bases. Moving from a proprietary, bare-metal underlying infrastructure to a Kubernetes-based one also may help the company with hiring and retaining talent, the case study says. The case study quotes Marc Power, a Microsoft Partner Software Architect tin its Experiences + Devices unit, as saying the company will “see substantial business savings – not just from packing applications together in AKS clusters, or using containers instead of VMs, but by creating one platform for all our application developers.” When Office 365/Microsoft 365 developers make changes to their code, they can use Azure Pipelines or Docker to package their services as a container and push the image to Azure Container Registry. The containers are deployed to test clusters on AKS. Microsoft is using internal deployment rings to validate gradually new features and releases before rolling them out more broadly. The case study notes that moving Microsoft 365 to Azure is a “multiyear effort that’s still underway.”
