SIEMENS Healthineers With Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

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This Article is based on case study of one of the service of Global Cloud Leader Microsoft Azure that is ? Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) ? .

?? What Is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) ?

?? Microsoft Azure is a world-renown cloud platform for SMBs to large scale business, while Kubernetes is a modern-day approach that is rapidly becoming the regular methodology to manage cloud-native applications in a production environment. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)  has brought both solutions together that allow customers to create fully-managed Kubernetes clusters quickly and easily.

?? AKS is an open-source fully managed container orchestration service that became available in June 2018 and is available on the Microsoft Azure public cloud that can be used to deploy, scale and manage Docker containers and container-based applications in a cluster environment.

?? 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 you 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.

?? Benefits of Azure Kubernetes Service ??

?? 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 Active Directory 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.

?? Features of Azure Kubernetes Service ??

?? Microsoft Azure offers Azure Kubernetes Service that simplifies managed Kubernetes cluster deployment in the public cloud environment and also manages health and monitoring of managed Kubernetes service. Customers can create AKS clusters using the Azure portal or Azure CLI and can manage the agent nodes.

?? A template-based deployment using Terraform and Resource Manager templates can also be chosen to deploy the AKS cluster that manages the auto-configuration of master and worker nodes of the Kubernetes cluster. Some additional features such as advanced networking, monitoring, and Azure AD integration can also be configured. Let’s take a look into the features that Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers.

? Nodes and clusters Management with AKS ?

?? In AKS, apps and supporting 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 pool. Nodes in the Kubernetes cluster are scaled-up and scaled-down according to the resources are 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) with AKS ???????

?? 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 with AKS ?

?? 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 Azure Kubernetes environment with less stress on the configuration.

?? AKS also offers support for Docker image format and can also integrate with Azure Container Registry (ACR) to provide private storage for Docker images. And, regular compliance with the industry standards such as System and Organization Controls (SOC), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and ISO make AKS more reliable across various business.

?? Azure Kubernetes Service In HealthCare World ??

? Siemens Healthineers moves more computing to the cloud to support value-based care development ?

?? Siemens Healthineers AG is the mother company for several medical technology companies and is headquartered in Erlangen, Germany. The company dates its early beginnings in 1847 to a small family business in Berlin, co-founded by Werner von Siemens. 

? Siemens Healthineers is leading the digitalization of healthcare with its Digital Ecosystem, which helps health providers and solution developers bring more value to the delivery of care, ultimately improving the quality of insights derived from healthcare data. Siemens Healthineers uses Microsoft Azure to make solutions more accessible, and it uses Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and other tools for a fast, efficient, and competitive development pipeline.

Digitalization is critical to technological progress in many industries, and healthcare is no exception. The healthcare industry needs ways to pull its data together, structure and analyze it, and draw conclusions that lead to improved ways of diagnosing patients and managing therapy. Siemens Healthineers is facilitating this transition with the Siemens Healthineers Digital Ecosystem.

? Using Azure services to streamline development processes ?

?? Siemens Healthineers is focusing on speeding development and implementing a continuous delivery approach. The company not only provides its own software products, but it has also decided to encourage other developers to use its infrastructure to deliver solutions and services and bring even more value to customers. This requires rethinking the development processes.

? Siemens Healthineers has taken a containerized approach to application development, which means it uses virtualization at the application operating system level as opposed to launching virtual machines.

? The company deploys its distributed applications in Docker containers, orchestrates those containers using Kubernetes, and monitors and manages the environment with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) . Siemens Healthineers chose AKS because developers can quickly and easily work with their applications with minimal operations and maintenance overhead—provisioning, upgrading, and scaling resources without taking applications offline.

?? With AKS, Siemens Healthineers can comfortably scale out its Kubernetes environment and scale back again if it doesn’t need the compute power, creating very high-density deployments on a microservices level.

“ Using Azure Kubernetes Service puts us into a position to not only deploy our business logic in Docker containers, including the orchestration, but also to easily manage the exposure and control and meter the access .”  

- Thomas Gossler: Lead Architect, Digital Ecosystem Platform

?? Managing a stable runtime environment with AKS helps Siemens Healthineers realize shorter release cycles and achieve its desired continuous delivery approach. Highly regulated environments like healthcare typically require many steps to go from development to public release, but implementing a continuous delivery pipeline has simplified the process and helped Siemens Healthineers achieve the speed it wants. And when rolling out new software, the company appreciates that it doesn’t have to worry about breaking its production environment, due to AKS upgrade and failure domains—new releases get deployed smoothly to customers with zero downtime.

? Siemens Healthineers relies on a serverless application model to expedite development, and as a result, developers have a very short path from coding to actual operation of their code.

?? “This is about economies of scale,” explains Gossler. “By operating the infrastructure at low cost and high availability, which we’re able to do with Azure, our customers benefit directly. And by incorporating technologies like Kubernetes, a well-known open-source environment, we are enabling partners to bring their own applications and software into our system so that together we can offer more and better solutions to our customers worldwide. We’ve been working with Azure for three-and-a-half years, and I’m reassured time and time again that Microsoft is able to provide us with the technology we need to keep moving forward. I‘m looking forward to continuing this relationship.”

?? Azure Kubernetes Service Use Cases ??

• 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.
• 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, it improves the security and speed of the development process with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) with dynamic policy controls.
• 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, if will scale-out additional pods automatically without any additional servers to manage in the Kubernetes environment.
• Data streaming: AKS can also be used to ingest and process real-time data streams with data points via sensors and perform quick analysis.

?? 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.

?? AKS nodes are scaled-out automatically as the demand increases. It has numerous benefits such as security with role-based access, easy integration with other development tools, and running any workload in the Kubernetes cluster environment. It also offers efficient utilization of resources, removes complexities, easily scaled-out, and migrates any existing workload to a containerized environment and all containerized resources can be accessed via the AKS management portal or AKS CLI.

“I don’t need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server faster… carrying around these non-connected computers is byzantine by comparison.” 

- Steve Jobs, Co-founder, CEO and Chairman, Apple Inc.