Azure Kubernetes Service and its Use-Cases

Task Description ??

??? Research for industry use-cases of Azure Kubernetes Service and create a blog, Article, or Video elaborating how it works.

Hello, Connections !!!

Today I am here with a new article that is based on?Azure Kubernetes Service.?This is an important article on Azure Kubernetes Service, its benefits, features, and why we use Azure Kubernetes Service, and its industrial use-cases. In this article,?you will get to know about Azure Kubernetes Service in detail.

Let's Dive in !!!

Kubernetes is by far the most popular container orchestration tool, yet the complexities of managing the tool have led to the rise of fully-managed Kubernetes services over the past few years.

Although Azure supports multiple container tools, it’s now going all-in on Kubernetes and will deprecate its original offerings this year. The great part about cloud-based managed Kubernetes services like?Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?is that it integrates natively with other Azure services, and you don’t have to worry about managing the availability of your underlying clusters, auto-scaling, or patching your underlying VMs.?

In this blog post, we’ll be reviewing the basics of Kubernetes and AKS, before diving into a real-life use case with AKS.?Before moving towards Azure Kubernetes Service, let's talk about the Basics of Kubernetes.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes?is an open-source project that has become one of the most popular container orchestration tools for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Kubernetes defines a set of building blocks ("primitives"), which collectively provide mechanisms that deploy, maintain and scale applications based on CPU, memory, or custom metrics.

Kubernetes is a highly flexible container tool to consistently deliver complex applications running on clusters of hundreds to thousands of individual servers.

Basic benefits of Kubernetes include:

• Automated rollouts and rollbacks
• Self-healing
• Secret and configuration management
• Run distributed systems resiliently
• Automatically mount a storage system

Why Kubernetes?

K8s is already a significant player in cloud computing. Be it a small or a large enterprise, everyone is gradually flocking their businesses around Kubernetes.

Google announced the Kubernetes a FOSS in 2014 and has since been considered the standardized means of orchestrating virtual containers. Also, with increasing cloud tech popularity in every sector, the buzz around K8s has seen a definite spike, especially since 2019.

K8s helps businesses by maintaining the clusters of containers by providing proper automation tools. It provides tools to prepare and run applications based on host memory, central processor, and custom metrics.

It has all the capabilities to approach the critical concerns of any given microservice architecture successfully.

Why Use Kubernetes??

When running containers in a production environment, containers need to be managed to ensure they are operating as expected in an effort to ensure there is no downtime.

• Container Orchestration:?Without container orchestration, If a container was to go down and stop working, an engineer would need to know the container has failed and manually start a new one. Wouldn’t it be better if this was handled automatically by its own system? Kubernetes provides a robust declarative framework to run your containerized applications and services resiliently.
• Cloud Agnostic:?Kubernetes has been designed and built to be used anywhere (public/private/hybrid clouds)
• Prevents Vendor Lock-In:?Your containerized application and Kubernetes manifests will run the same way on any platform with minimal changes
• Increase Developer Agility and Faster Time-to-Market:?Spend less time scripting deployment workflows and focus on developing. Kubernetes provides a declarative configuration that allows engineers to define how their service is to be run by Kubernetes, Kubernetes will then ensure the state of the application is maintained
• Cloud Aware:?Kubernetes understands and supports a number of various clouds such as Google Cloud, Azure, AWS. This allows Kubernetes to instantiate various public cloud-based resources, such as instances, VMs, load balancers, public IPs, storage..etc.

Features of Kubernetes :

Service Topology

Routing of service traffic based upon cluster topology.

IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack

Allocation of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to Pods and Services.

Batch execution

In addition to services, Kubernetes can manage your batch and CI workloads, replacing containers that fail, if desired.

Storage orchestration

Automatically mount the storage system of your choice, whether from local storage, a public cloud provider such as?GCP?or?AWS, or a network storage system such as NFS, iSCSI, Gluster, Ceph, Cinder, or Flocker.

Horizontal scaling

Scale your application up and down with a simple command, with a UI, or automatically based on CPU usage.

Secret and configuration management

Deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your image and without exposing secrets in your stack configuration.

Automated rollouts and rollbacks

Kubernetes progressively rolls out changes to your application or its configuration, while monitoring application health to ensure it doesn't kill all your instances at the same time. If something goes wrong, Kubernetes will roll back the change for you. Take advantage of a growing ecosystem of deployment solutions.

Service discovery and load balancing

No need to modify your application to use an unfamiliar service discovery mechanism. Kubernetes gives Pods their own IP addresses and a single DNS name for a set of Pods, and can load-balance across them.

Automatic bin packing

Automatically places containers based on their resource requirements and other constraints, while not sacrificing availability. Mix critical and best-effort workloads in order to drive up utilization and save even more resources.

Self-healing

Restarts containers that fail, replaces and reschedules containers when nodes die, kills containers that don't respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn't advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve.

What is Azure Kubernetes Service(AKS)?

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a fully-managed service that allows you to run Kubernetes in Azure without having to manage your own Kubernetes clusters. Azure manages all the complex parts of running Kubernetes, and you can focus on your containers.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance.

Azure Kubernetes Service offers provisioning, scaling, and upgrades of resources as per requirement or demand without any downtime in the Kubernetes cluster and the best thing about AKS is that we don’t require deep knowledge and expertise in container orchestration to manage AKS.

AKS is certainly an ideal platform for developers to develop their modern applications using Kubernetes on the Azure architecture where Azure Container Instances are the pretty right choice to deploy containers on the public cloud. The Azure Container Instances help in reducing the stress on developers to deploy and run their applications on Kubernetes architecture.

Basic features include:

• Enforce rules defined in Azure Policy across multiple clusters
• Kubernetes can scale your Nodes using cluster auto-scaler
• Pay only for the nodes (VMs)
• Easier cluster upgrades
• Integrated with various Azure and OSS tools and services
• Kubernetes RBAC and Azure Active Directory Integration
• Expand your scale even greater by scheduling your containers on Azure Container Instances
• Security, Access, and Monitoring
• Clusters and Nodes
• Virtual Networks and Ingress
• Development Tooling Integration

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:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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 Use Cases

• Data streaming: AKS can also be used to ingest and process real-time data streams with data points via sensors and perform quick analysis.
• Bringing DevOps and Kubernetes together: AKS is also a reliable resource to bring Kubernetes and DevOps together for securing DevOps implementation with Kubernetes. Bringing both together improves the security and speed of the development process with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) with dynamic policy controls.
• Migration of existing applications: You can easily migrate existing apps to containers and run them with Azure Kubernetes Service. You can also control access via Azure AD integration and SLA-based Azure Services like Azure Database using Open Service Broker for Azure (OSBA).
• Simplifying the configuration and management of microservices-based Apps: You can also simplify the development and management of microservices-based apps as well as streamline load balancing, horizontal scaling, self-healing, and secret management with AKS.
• Ease of scaling: AKS can also be applied in many other use cases such as ease of scaling by using Azure Container Instances (ACI) and AKS. By doing this, you can use AKS virtual node to provision pods inside Azure Container Instance (ACI) that start within a few seconds and enables AKS to run with required resources. If your AKS cluster is run out of resources, it will scale out additional pods automatically without any additional servers to manage in the Kubernetes environment.

CASE STUDY OF FINASTRA WITH AZURE KUBERNETES SERVICE

With offices in over 60 countries, 10,000 staff, and revenue exceeding $2 billion, Finastra is a significant Fintech force. Already an established leader in financial software and cloud solutions, its first platform offering, FusionFabric.cloud, launched to public cloud in June 2018.

Azure is a key differentiator for Finastra. Microsoft combines first-class technology with world-class brand recognition to create instant impact for our customers.?

Félix Grévy: Global Head of Product Management

Finastra

FusionFabric.cloud is Finastra’s ground-breaking Platform as a Service (PaaS) development ecosystem that is revolutionizing the future of banking. Banks, financial technology (fintech) providers, independent developers, and Universities are leveraging its collaborative, open-source environment to author innovative new applications for retail and corporate banking, payment processing, lending, treasury, and capital markets. The result is banks and financial services institutions can quickly implement new product innovations on top of existing systems, in a secure environment, at significantly reduced operating costs.

Creating a development ecosystem

With fintech gaining momentum, Finastra seized the opportunity to champion collaboration and opened its core systems to third-party development. Félix Grévy, Global Head of Product Management at FusionFabric.cloud explains, “Our goal was to create an ecosystem of development partners to deliver applications quickly and at low cost. At the same time, our customers would be able to leverage fintech innovation in our familiar and stable workflow environment.”

Fast and secure cloud-native environment

Finastra’s early commitment to building in a cloud-native environment opened a host of API opportunities. Azure was the preferred cloud solution for four main reasons: its API management security features, its technical capabilities, its support of open source technologies, and crucially, its inbuilt global regulatory and data residency compliance.

Azure Active Directory provides world-class authentication and security. This allows Finastra to manage users and single sign-on across all applications. Active Directory is widely used in banks, feeds into Federated Identity Management protocol and supports OAuth 2.0. “Our integration with Active Directory is highly attractive to our banking and financial clients,” confirms Grévy.

And the platform is?fast. Azure provides the latest CPU processors to run its ‘financial model builder’ algorithmic calculations, and results show a ten-fold increase in speed for customers leveraging V100 GPUs to calculate a portfolio of 30 years swaps. It’s a win all round.

Open-source solution

Leveraging open source technology was a key consideration when designing FusionFabric.cloud. As Grévy puts it, “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We wanted to rely on proven, industry-approved techniques and technologies.” Finastra uses HTML5 for its user interface, Java & JavaScript in the backend, and frontend development takes place in node.js. “We also use Helm Chart, Node-Red, Eclipse Che, Spring Boot, to name a few. The ease of integration we have experienced with Azure proves Microsoft has a genuine commitment to open source.”?

Hybrid connectivity

Azure utilizes comprehensive techniques to manage hybrid connectivity for the large volume of banking clients that still run data on-premise. Azure ExpressRoute provides a direct, secure link between banks and the cloud. This adds value to the FusionFabric.cloud platform, as Grévy explains, “Banks can run their core system on-premise, while still managing marketplace applications on the cloud. We are facilitating their controlled exposure to the cloud, and that’s exciting.”

Streamlined API management

Azure’s API integration allows for an end-to-end solution between the banking environment, fintech partners, and the platform. Extensive API analytic features give Finastra intricate insight into their platform portfolio: “For example,” explains Grévy, “we are able to see which APIs are getting the most use, and which ones aren’t. We use this information to understand current trends on a very granular level. We share findings with our API partners to help them maximize success and optimize their application delivery journey.”?

Working with such a large portfolio of partners and customers requires a complete delivery integration pipeline. This allows the team to publish, upgrade, maintain and deploy APIs in a continuous fashion. As the team dives deeper into Infrastructure as Code (IoC), Cosmos DB stores configuration information to support optimal build environments. Releases are smoother and less prone to errors with Virtual Studio Team Services (VSTS) where the team also collaborates on code and experiments with A/B split testing. “Our platform intersects a great deal of data and technology,” says Grévy, “yet our complete integration with Azure streamlines our infrastructure simplifies our processes, and makes our lives infinitely easier.”

Embracing Azure Kubernetes Service

Kubernetes is at the heart of the FusionFabric.cloud platform, allowing the orchestration of Docker containers. Fintech applications can run and scale with ease on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), the next-generation service that builds on the Azure Container Service Engine (ACS). Currently, on an ACS engine, Finastra plans to migrate to AKS. AKS brings a fundamental benefit to the development team at Finastra, as Grévy explains, “AKS gives us a pure Kubernetes and Docker imaging environment that we don’t have to manage ourselves. Our team has regained the resources to accelerate deployment and maximize our PaaS offering.”

The team uses Azure Container Registry (ACR) to simplify container development, while geo-replication helps run disaster recovery procedures for different locations. The ACR can also audit whether data residency is running in the same jurisdiction as the banks. Inbuilt application auto-scaling allows the team to manage cost burden and react quickly to meet spiked demands of partners and customers.

The future of finance is open

We are built for innovation,” enthuses Grévy. “What we are doing in partnership with Microsoft Azure is completely unique in our industry. We’ve made a significant step forward in the fintech innovation space and our team is energized and inspired to discover what’s next.”

The ease of integration we have experienced with Azure proves Microsoft has a genuine commitment to open source.?

--- Félix Grévy: Global Head of Product Management

Finastra

Our platform intersects a great deal of data and technology, yet our complete integration with Azure streamlines our infrastructure simplifies our processes, and makes our lives infinitely easier.?

--- Félix Grévy: Global Head of Product Management

Finastra

Conclusion:

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.

Azure Kubernetes Service is the best option for deploying a?cloud-ready and microservice-based cloud-native application. It also supports the containerization of monolithic applications.

In this article, we’ve also learned how Finastra achieved a rapid digital transformation to improve its capabilities and meet the business’s demands faster.?What features and benefits Azure Kubernetes Service provides enterprises to solve their problems and much more,

So, we also learned that how Company’s like Finastra Group uses Azure Kubernetes Service to solve the challenges of software development operations.

Thanks for reading the article.????????

Hope this article helpful to you!!!!

You can appreciate the article by giving it a like and posting comments about your feedback.