Kubernetes is great for running containerized applications in a automated scalable environment. The addition of AKS makes is even easier to running that same cluster in Azure. Running those AKS clusters became even more powerful with features like Kubernetes Event-driven Autoscaling (KEDA), Workload Identity and integrations with Azure services like Azure Key Vault and Azure Policy. The past year also added azure managed resources for Prometheus and Grafana. These additions are great, but there is still lots of configuration to do before the cluster is production ready. What if all this configuration is done for you? Microsoft felt the same and thus created Azure Kubernetes Service Automatic. With AKS Automatic you are able to create clusters quick and complete with features you want. Do you want a cluster with monitoring and scaling prebuild? AKS Automatic will do that for you. In this session we will have a look at the features AKS Automatic has to offer and if it is something you could use.

The authentication landscape in Azure has changed a lot. Traditionally applications used certificates, keys, passwords and many other things to be able to connect to external resources. Sometimes these methods still apply and are valid to use, but most of the time they can be insecure and are very annoying to maintain. These days authentication through identity is very popular and makes maintenance a joke. In this session I will show you what managed identities are, we will have a look into what the difference is between system-assigned and user-assigned identities and we will dive into an example application which leverages managed identities. We will also dive into using managed identities with Azure SQL Server and the quirks you need to think about.