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Public Preview Announcement – workload orchestration 

Introduction:

As enterprises continue to scale their edge infrastructure, IT teams face growing complexity in deploying, managing, and monitoring workloads across distributed environments. Today, we are excited to announce the Public Preview of workload orchestration — a purpose-built platform that redefines configuration and deployment management across enterprise environments. Workload orchestration is designed to help you centrally manage configurations for applications deployed in diverse locations (from factories and retail stores to restaurants and hospitals) while empowering on-site teams with flexibility.

Modern enterprises increasingly deploy Kubernetes-based applications at the edge, where infrastructure diversity and operational constraints are the norm. Managing these with site-specific configurations traditionally requires creating and maintaining multiple variants of the same application for different sites – a process that is costly, error-prone, and hard to scale. Workload orchestration addresses this challenge by introducing a centralized, template-driven approach to configuration. With this platform, central IT can define application configurations once and reuse them across many deployments, ensuring consistency and compliance, while still allowing site owners to adjust parameters for their local needs within controlled guardrails. The result is a significantly simplified deployment experience that maintains both central governance and localized flexibility.

Key features of workload orchestration

The public preview release of workload orchestration includes several key innovations and capabilities designed to simplify how IT manages complex workload deployments:

• Powerful Template Framework & Schema Inheritance: Define application configurations and schemas one time and reuse or extend them for multiple deployments. Workload orchestration introduces a templating framework that lets central IT teams create a single source of truth for app configurations, which can then be inherited and customized by different sites as needed. This ensures consistency across deployments and streamlines the authoring process by eliminating duplicate work.


• Dependent Application Management: Manage and deploy interdependent applications seamlessly using orchestrated workflows. The platform supports configuring and deploying apps with dependencies via a guided CLI or an intuitive portal experience, reducing deployment friction and minimizing errors when rolling out complex, multi-tier applications.


• Custom Validation Rules: Ensure every configuration is right before it’s applied. Administrators can define pre-deployment validation expressions (rules) that automatically check parameter inputs and settings. This means that when site owners customize configurations, all inputs are validated against predefined rules to prevent misconfigurations, helping to reduce rollout failures.


• External Validation Rules: External validation enables you to verify the solution template through an external service, such as an Azure Function or a webhook. The external validation service receives events from the workload orchestration service and can execute custom validation logic. This design pattern is commonly used when customers require complex validation rules that exceed data type and expression-based checks. It allows the implementation of business-specific validation logic, thereby minimizing runtime errors.


• Integrated Monitoring & Unified Control: Track and manage deployments from a single pane of glass. Workload orchestration includes an integrated monitoring dashboard that provides near real-time visibility into deployment progress and the health of orchestrated workloads. From this centralized interface, you can pause, retry, or roll back deployments as needed, with full logging and compliance visibility for all actions.

• Enhanced Authoring Experience (No-Code UI with RBAC): We’ve built a web-based orchestration portal that offers a no-code configuration authoring experience. Configuration managers can easily define or update application settings via an intuitive UI – comparing previous configuration revisions side by side, copying values between versions, and defining hierarchical parameters with just a few clicks. This portal is secured with role-based access control (RBAC) and full audit logging, so non-developers and local operators can safely make approved adjustments without risking security or compliance.

• CLI and Automation Support: For IT admins and DevOps engineers, workload orchestration provides a command-line interface (CLI) optimized for automation. This enables scripted deployments and environment bootstrapping. Power users can integrate the orchestration into CI/CD pipelines or use it to programmatically manage application lifecycles across sites, using familiar CLI commands to deploy or update configurations in bulk.


• Fast Onboarding and Setup: Getting started with orchestrating your edge environments is quick. The platform offers guided setup workflows to configure your organizational hierarchy of edge sites, define user roles, and set up access policies in minutes. This means you can onboard your team and prepare your edge infrastructure for orchestration without lengthy configuration processes.

Architecture & Workflow:

Workload orchestration is a service built with cloud and edge components. At a high level, the cloud control plane of workload orchestration provides customers and opportunity to use a dedicated resource provider to define templates centrally which WO edge agents consume and contextualize based on required customization needed at edge locations. The overall object model is embedded in Azure Resource Manager thus providing customers fine grained RBAC (Role Based Access Control) for all workload orchestration resources. The key actions to manage WO are governed by an intuitive CLI and portal experience. There is also a simplified no code experience for non-technical onsite staff for authoring, monitoring and deploying solution with contextualized configurations.

Important Details & Limitations:

Preview Scope: During public preview, workload orchestration supports Kubernetes-based workloads at the edge (e.g., AKS edge deployments or Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters). Support for other types of workloads or cloud VMs is coming soon.

Regions and Availability: The service is available in East US and East US2 regions during preview.

Integration Requirements: Using workload orchestration with your edge Kubernetes clusters require them to be connected (e.g., via Azure Arc) for full functionality.

Getting Started with workload orchestration

• Availability: Workload orchestration is available in public preview starting 19^th May, 2025. For access to public preview, please complete the form to get access for your subscription or share your subscription details over email at configmanager@service.microsoft.com. Once you have shared the details, the team will get back to you with an update on your request!

Try it Out: We encourage you to try workload orchestration with one of your real-world scenarios. A great way to start is to pick a small application that you typically deploy to a few edge sites and use the orchestration to deploy it. Create a template for that app, define a couple of parameters (like a site name or a configuration toggle), and run a deployment to two or three test sites. This hands-on trial will let you experience first-hand how the process works and the value it provides. As you grow more comfortable, you can expand to more sites or more complex applications. Because this is a preview, feel free to experiment — you can deploy to non-production clusters or test environments to see how the orchestration fits your workflow.

Feedback and Engagement

We’d love to hear your feedback! As you try out workload orchestration, please share your experiences, questions, and suggestions. You can leave a comment below this blog post – our team will be actively monitoring and responding to comments throughout the preview. Let us know what worked well, what could be improved, and any features you’d love to see in the future. Your insights are incredibly valuable to us and will help shape the product as we progress toward General Availability.

If you encounter any issues or have urgent feedback, you can also engage with us through the following channels:

• Email at configmanager@service.microsoft.com or fill up the form at WOfeedback for feedback


• Email at configmanager@service.microsoft.com or fill up the form at WOReportIssuees for reporting issues


• Contact your Microsoft account representative or support channel and mention “workload orchestration Public Preview” – they can route your feedback to us as well.


• Occasionally, we may reach out to select preview customers for deeper feedback sessions or to participate in user research. If you’re interested in that, please mention it in your comment or forum post.

We truly consider our preview users as co-creators of the product. Many of the features and improvements in workload orchestration have been influenced by early customer input. So, thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts and helping us ensure that this platform meets your needs!

(Reminder: Since this is a public preview, it is not meant for production use yet. If you do decide to use it in a production scenario, do so with caution and be aware of the preview limitations. We will do our best to assist with any issues during preview).

Learn More

To help you get started and dive deeper into workload orchestration, we’ve prepared a set of resources:

• Workload orchestration Documentation – Overview and how-to guides: Learn about the architecture, concepts, and step-by-step instructions for using workload orchestration in our official docs. [WO documentation]


• Quick Start: Deploy Your First Application – Tutorial: Follow a guided tutorial to create a template and deploy a sample application to a simulated edge cluster using workload orchestration. [QuickStart]


• CLI Reference – Command reference: Detailed documentation of all workload orchestration CLI commands with examples. [CLI reference]

Conclusion:

We’re thrilled for you to explore workload orchestration and see how it can transform your edge deployment strategy. This public preview is a major step towards simplifying distributed workload management, and your participation and feedback are key to its success.