Public preview: AMD-based confidential VMs for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Azure Updates

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Published

Aug 1, 2022

Status

In preview

Timeline

  • August 2022
    Preview

Product

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Tag

Features
Pricing & Offerings
Open Source
Security

Category

Compute
Containers

Description

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) provides the capability for organizations to deploy containers at scale. We are expanding the Azure confidential computing portfolio to enable AMD-based confidential VM node pools in AKS, adding defense-in-depth to Azure's already hardened security profile.   

With the general availability of confidential virtual machines featuring AMD 3rd Gen EPYC™ processors, with Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) security features, organizations get VMs with isolated, encrypted memory and genuine confidentiality attestation rooted to the hardware.

AKS is now equipped to have confidential and non-confidential node pools on a single cluster. This means that applications processing sensitive data can reside in a VM-level Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) node pool with memory encryption keys generated from the chipset itself.

Confidential node pools on AKS enable a seamless transition of Linux container workloads to Azure without the overhead of changing code. 

Read the blog to learn more.