What is Azure Kubernetes Service?

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.

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

 Azure Kubernetes Service Benefits

Azure Kubernetes Service is currently competing with both Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).  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. 

What is Kubernetes?

Modern applications are increasingly built using containers, which are microservices packaged with their dependencies and configurations. Kubernetes (pronounced “koo-ber-net-ees”) is open-source software for deploying and managing those containers at scale—and it is also the Greek word for helmsmen of a ship or pilot. Build, deliver and scale containerised apps faster with Kubernetes, sometimes referred to as “k8 s” or “k-eights.”

Basics of Kubernetes 

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open source platform for container orchestration. It allows developers and engineers to manage containerized workloads and services through both declarative configuration and automation.

Basic benefits of Kubernetes include:

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

Key Terms

API Server: Exposes the underlying Kubernetes API. This is how various management tools interact with the Kubernetes cluster

Controller Manager: Watches the state of the cluster through API server and when necessary makes changes attempting to move the current state towards the desired state.

Etcd: Highly available key value store which maintains the Kubernetes cluster state. 

Scheduler: Schedules unassigned pods to nodes. Determines the most optimal node to run your pod

Node: A physical or virtual machine which is where Kubernetes runs your containers. 

Kube-proxy: A network proxy that proxies requests to Kubernetes services and their backend pods

Pods: One or more containers logically grouped together. Usually they need to share the same resources

Kublet: Agent that processes orchestration requests and handles starting pods that have been assigned to its node by the scheduler

Azure Kubernetes Service Features

Let’s take a look into the features that Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers:

Open-source environment with enterprise commitment: Microsoft has inducted the number of employees in 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 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.

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 Azure Kubernetes environment with less stress on the configuration.

 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.

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