AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service)
“Ship fast operate with ease and scale confidently”
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.
Why do you need Kubernetes?
Containers are a good way to bundle and run your applications. In a production environment, you need to manage the containers that run the applications and ensure that there is no downtime. For example, if a container goes down, another container needs to start. Wouldn’t it be easier if this behavior was handled by a system?
That’s how Kubernetes comes to the rescue! Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more. For example, Kubernetes can easily manage a canary deployment for your system.
How does Azure provide Kubernetes service?
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed container orchestration service, based on the open-source Kubernetes system, which is available on the Microsoft Azure public cloud. An organization can use AKS to deploy, scale and manage Docker containers and container-based applications across a cluster of container hosts.
Deploy and manage containerized applications more easily with a fully-managed Kubernetes service. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance. Unite your development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver and scale applications with confidence.
Common uses for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- Lift and shift to containers with AKS
- Microservices with AKS
- Secure DevOps for AKS
- Bursting from AKS with ACI
- Azure IoT reference architecture
- Machine Learning model training with AKS
- Data Streaming scenario
Azure Kubernetes Service Benefits
Azure Kubernetes Service is currently competing with both Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). It offers numerous features such as creating, managing, scaling, and monitoring Azure Kubernetes Clusters, which is attractive for users of Microsoft Azure. The following are some benefits offered by AKS:
- Efficient resource utilization: The fully managed AKS offers easy deployment and management of containerized applications with efficient resource utilization that elastically provisions additional resources without the headache of managing the Kubernetes infrastructure.
- Faster application development: Developers spent most of the time on bug-fixing. AKS reduces the debugging time while handling patching, auto-upgrades, and self-healing and simplifies the container orchestration. It definitely saves a lot of time and developers will focus on developing their apps while remaining more productive.
- Security and compliance: Cybersecurity is one of the most important aspects of modern applications and businesses. AKS integrates with Azure Active Directory (AD) and offers on-demand access to the users to greatly reduce threats and risks. AKS is also completely compliant with the standards and regulatory requirements such as System and Organization Controls (SOC), HIPAA, ISO, and PCI DSS.
- Quicker development and integration: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) supports auto-upgrades, monitoring, and scaling and helps in minimizing the infrastructure maintenance that leads to comparatively faster development and integration. It also supports provisioning additional compute resources in Serverless Kubernetes within seconds without worrying about managing the Kubernetes infrastructure.
Azure Kubernetes Service Features
An open-source environment with enterprise commitment
Microsoft has inducted a number of employees in the last couple of years to make Kubernetes easier for the businesses and developers to use and participate in open-source projects and became the third giant contributor to make Kubernetes more business-oriented, cloud-native, and accessible by bringing the best practices and advanced learning with diverse customers and users to the Kubernetes community.
Nodes and clusters
In AKS, apps, and support, services are run on Kubernetes nodes and the AKS cluster is a combination of one or more than one node. And, these AKS nodes are run on Azure Virtual Machines. Nodes that are configured with the same configuration are grouped together called node pools. Nodes in the Kubernetes cluster are scaled-up and scaled-down according to the resources required in the cluster. So, nodes, clusters, and node pools are the most prominent components of your Azure Kubernetes environment.
Role-based access control (RBAC)
AKS easily integrates with Azure Active Directory (AD) to provide role-based access, security, and monitoring of Kubernetes architecture on the basis of identity and group membership. You can also monitor the performance of your AKS and the apps.
Integration of development tools
Another important feature of AKS is the development tools such as Helm and Draft are seamlessly integrated with AKS where Azure Dev Spaces can provide a quicker and iterative Kubernetes development experience to the developers. Containers can be run and debugged directly in the Azure Kubernetes environment with less stress on the configuration.
How Starbucks uses Azure AKS?
In 2017, Starbucks embarked on a journey to create a custom-developed, AI-driven recommendation platform (“Deep Brew”) to serve customers with relevant product recommendations across multiple channels including in-app ordering and digital menu boards. Deep Brew implements reinforced learning capabilities that allow Starbucks to adapt to customer preferences and context over time (category, ingredient, price sensitivity, time of day, weather, and location). Deep Brew is backed by scalable and flexible Azure infrastructure that can spin up and be torn down in minutes to build high-quality production ML applications with the best-of-breed secure and compliant environments. Starbucks will share its journey to deliver this curated customer experience using Azure cloud to scale and innovate consistently across all platforms through which customers interact and order at Starbucks.
Starbucks uses the Azure Sphere guardian module to connect coffee machines
As customers wait for their double-shot, no-whip mochas to brew, these IoT-enabled machines are doing more than meets the eye. They’re collecting more than a dozen data points for each precious shot, like the types of beans used, water temperature, and water quality. The solution enables Starbucks to proactively identify any issues with their machines in order to smooth their customers’ paths to caffeinated bliss.
Beyond predictive maintenance, Azure Sphere will enable Starbucks to transmit new recipes directly to machines in 30,000 stores rather than manually uploading recipes via thumb drives, saving Starbucks lots of time, money, and thumb drives
Conclusion
Businesses are transforming from on-premises to the cloud very quickly while building and managing modern and cloud-native applications. Kubernetes is one of the solutions that is open-sourced and supports building and deploying cloud-native apps with complete orchestration. Azure Kubernetes Service is a robust and cost-effective container orchestration service that helps you to deploy and manage containerized applications in seconds where additional resources are assigned automatically without the headache of managing additional servers.
