Industries use case of AKS ?

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 industries use case of Kubernetes and AKS, before diving into a real-life use case with AKS. 

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 which allows engineers to define how their service is to be ran 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.

Basics of Azure Kubernetes Services

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. Basic features include: 

• 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
• Enforce rules defined in Azure Policy across multiple clusters
• Kubernetes can scale your Nodes using cluster autoscaler
• Expand your scale even greater by scheduling your containers on Azure Container Instances

AKS in order to solve for the following business use case:

• Achieve portability across on-prem and public clouds
• Accelerate containerized application development
• Unify development and operational teams on a single platform
• Take advantage of native integration into the Azure ecosystem to easily achieve:
• Enterprise-Grade Security
• Azure Active Directory integration
• Track, validate, and enforce compliance across Azure estate and AKS clusters
• Hardened OS images for nodes

The customer’s architecture includes a lot of the common best practices to ensure we can meet the customers business and operational requirements:

Cluster Multi-Tenancy

SDLC environments are split across two clusters isolating Production from lower level SDLC environments such as dev/stage. The use of namespaces provides the same operation benefits while saving cost and operational complexity by not deploying an AKS cluster per SDLC environment.

Scheduling and Resource Quotas

Since multiple SDLC environments and other applications share the same cluster, it’s imperative that scheduling and resource quotas are established to ensure applications and the services they depend on get the resources required for operation. When combined with cluster autoscaler we can ensure that our applications get the resources they need and that compute infrastructure is scaled in when they need it.

Azure AD integration

Leverages Azure AD to authenticate/authorize users to access and initiate CRUD (create, update, and delete) operations against AKS clusters. AAD integration makes it convenient and easy to unify layers of authentication (Azure and Kubernetes) and provide the right personnel with the level of access they require to meet their responsibilities while adhering to principle of least privilege 

Pod Identities

Instead of hardcoding static credentials within our containers, Pod Identity is deployed into the default namespace and dynamically assigns Managed Identities to the appropriate pods determined by label. This provides our example application the ability to write to Cosmos DB and our CI/CD pipelines the ability to deploy containers to production and stage clusters.

Ingress Controller

Ingress controllers bring traffic into the AKS cluster by creating ingress rules and routes, providing application services with reverse proxying, traffic routing/load balancing, and TLS termination. This allows us to evenly distribute traffic across our application services to ensure scalability and meet reliability requirements.

Monitoring

Naturally, monitoring the day-to-day performance and operations of our AKS clusters is key to maintaining uptime and proactively solving potential issues. Using AKS’ toggle-based implementation, application services hosted on the AKS cluster can easily be monitored and debugged using Azure Monitor.

Summary

Azure Kubernetes Service is a powerful service for running containers in the cloud. Best of all, you only pay for the VMs and other resources consumed, not for AKS itself, so it’s easy to try out. With the best practices described in this post and the AKS Quickstart, you should be able to launch a test cluster in under an hour and see the benefits of AKS for yourself. 

Need help architecting or managing an application on Azure Kubernetes Service? Contact us or learn more about our Azure Migration Service.