Building the future of modern applications with Azure’s adaptive cloud approach

The desire for modern applications

In many industries, the demand for modern applications is being driven by the desire to provide exceptional customer experiences and improve operational efficiency. The ability to rapidly develop, deploy, and scale these applications is important for addressing market demands, integrating new technologies like AI, and enabling greater operational flexibility and resiliency. To meet these goals, we are seeing an increasing number of organizations adopt a cloud-native approach towards application development and infrastructure management.

To share a few examples, retailers are adopting cloud and edge-based applications to enable real-time inventory management, personalized customer engagement, and streamlined supply chain operations. In the manufacturing space, companies are leveraging modern applications to collect and analyze data from connected assets and devices, driving smarter decision-making while increasing efficiency.?

I have talked about this shift towards cloud native and the benefits customers can realize in a couple recent blog posts. My previous post, Improving operational resiliency with Azure’s adaptive cloud and Kubernetes, explored how advances in open-source software infrastructure have made it easier and more cost effective to build resilient, distributed applications. While in another post, Harmonizing AI-enhanced physical and cloud operations, I discussed how centralized application deployment, Kubernetes everywhere, and streamlined DevOps integration are becoming fundamental strategies for modernizing operations. Today, I am going to expand on these ideas by exploring how Azure’s adaptive cloud approach helps address the challenges of modern application development and empowers organizations to innovate at scale.

Challenges in building and deploying modern applications

Organizations face numerous challenges as they modernize application development. Managing complex infrastructure across diverse environments such as IoT and hybrid systems demands significant expertise and resources. Scalability requirements add another layer of difficulty, as enabling consistent application performance across distributed locations is important for mission-critical workloads. In addition, evolving security and compliance standards place additional pressure on IT teams to help safeguard sensitive data while complying with and adhering to global regulations. Legacy systems can add to these difficulties by limiting developer productivity and slowing down innovation through outdated processes.

Azure’s adaptive cloud approach to empowering modern applications

Azure’s adaptive cloud approach helps address these challenges by providing a unified platform for building, deploying, and managing cloud-native applications across distributed environments.

Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes

Microsoft offers a fully managed Kubernetes environment through Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes. This service can help reduce operational complexity by automating lifecycle management tasks such as scaling, updates, and security configurations. In addition, businesses can benefit from increased efficiency, reduced costs, and the ability to deploy resilient applications in both cloud and edge environments. Smart defaults further optimize configurations, helping to ensure reliable performance without requiring extensive Kubernetes expertise.

Building and deploying resilient applications often involves complexities like secrets management, network connectivity, and distributed storage. Azure helps address these challenges with integrated solutions:

• Secrets Management: The Azure Key Vault Secret Store Extension (SSE) for Arc-enabled Kubernetes enables secure management and creation of secrets from the cloud using Azure Key Vault (AKV) to a Kubernetes secret store at the edge, offering continuity even during intermittent connectivity (up to 72 hours).
• Observability: Azure Monitor Application Insights, Azure Monitor Container Insights, Azure Managed Prometheus, and Azure Managed Grafana offer the full range of managed telemetry and reporting necessary to deploy and operate modern cloud-native applications across thousands of endpoints. It further enables developers to collect observability data (metrics, logs, traces) from Arc extensions leveraging CNCF standards (OpenTelemetry).
• Distributed Storage: Azure Container Storage enabled by Azure Arc offers a shared filesystem with triplication for fault-tolerance, helping to eliminate the need for complex storage solutions.

Securing and optimizing resilient Kubernetes applications

Microsoft prioritizes security and compliance at every layer. By leveraging Azure Arc, businesses can centralize security management, monitor compliance, and address vulnerabilities through Azure tools like Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Azure Policy. Features like conditional workload deployment help ensure applications align with security and regulatory requirements.

For mission-critical Kubernetes environments, Azure enables resilience through recommendations like Azure Container Storage enabled by Azure Arc, where you can deploy your application using ReadWriteOnce (RWO) fault-tolerant Kubernetes volumes with ReadWriteMany file system support for multi-node deployments. These configurations support data durability and operational continuity even during hardware failures.

To learn more about improving operation resiliency with Azure’s adaptive cloud and Kubernetes, visit my previous LinkedIn blog post here.

Empowering the ecosystem behind modern edge applications: Azure Arc ISV Partner Program

Partners and the broader ecosystem are central to Microsoft’s mission, and we recognize the critical role they play in delivering customer-centric solutions. Introduced in November 2024 at Microsoft Ignite, the Azure Arc ISV Partner Program highlights how Microsoft values its partners and the broader ecosystem. This program helps empower Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) by providing a platform that allows them to focus on their core strengths – creating innovative solutions that address customer needs – while Azure provides the infrastructure and tools to support and scale their offerings. Through this program, ISVs can publish their applications on the Azure Marketplace and make them accessible for deployment on Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters.?

This initiative offers tangible benefits to both ISVs and customers. ISVs gain access to a rapidly growing base of Azure Arc users and enjoy technical and marketing support from Azure to optimize their solutions for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. On the other hand, this integration provides customers with a broad selection of enterprise-grade tools they already know and love, validated by Azure to meet standards for compatibility and security. Customers can confidently deploy these validated applications to their Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure, knowing they integrate easily with Azure Arc’s governance and management capabilities.

By focusing on essential categories such as databases, big data/analytics, and messaging, the Azure Arc ISV Partner Program fosters innovation and collaboration. To learn more about this initiative and how to get involved, visit our Azure Arc Tech Community Blog: Announcing the Azure Arc ISV Partner Program at Ignite.?

Next steps to building the apps of the future

Azure’s adaptive cloud approach helps address the pressing desire for agility, scalability, and innovation in modern application development. By combining first-party tools with a growing ecosystem of ISV partners, Azure can help provide the flexibility and reliability businesses expect to succeed in an increasingly complex landscape.?

Explore how Azure’s adaptive cloud solutions can help empower your application modernization journey and drive business outcomes. Visit the adaptive cloud page to learn more about our offerings or join the conversation at Azure Arc Jumpstart.