What should you know about Azure Kubernetes Service?

Before we talk about Azure Kubernetes Service(AKS), it is important to know what is Kubernetes, and even before that it is important to know what is a container.

Containers are a form of operating system virtualization. A single container might be used to run anything from a small microservice or software process to a larger application. Inside a container are all the necessary executables, binary code, libraries, and configuration files. Compared to server or machine virtualization approaches, however, containers do not contain operating system images. This makes them more lightweight and portable, with significantly less overhead. In larger application deployments, multiple containers may be deployed as one or more container clusters. Such clusters might be managed by a container orchestrator such as 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. The name Kubernetes originates from Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) simplifies deploying a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure by offloading the operational overhead to Azure. As a hosted Kubernetes service, Azure handles critical tasks, like health monitoring and maintenance. Since Kubernetes masters are managed by Azure, you only manage and maintain the agent nodes. Thus, AKS is free; you only pay for the agent nodes within your clusters, not for the masters.

When you deploy an AKS cluster, the Kubernetes master and all nodes are deployed and configured for you. Advanced networking, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) integration, monitoring, and other features can be configured during the deployment process.

Some of the most stand out features of AKS are as below:

Built-in Best Practices - AKS provides Proactive and actionable recommendations through Azure Advisor based on your configuration and usage telemetry. Grounded with knowledge from thousands of customer engagements AKS helps improve the performance, availability, and security of your cluster before there’s a problem. Resolving common issues becomes really easy with AKS's intelligent, self-diagnostic experience right in the portal which makes Self-service troubleshooting easy with tools used by the Microsoft customer support team.

Multi-Layer Security - AKS helps you to enforce compliance rules to your cluster and CI/CD pipeline consistently with Azure Policy and apply fine-grained identity and access control using Azure Active Directory. AKS also enables you to encrypt the disks used in your AKS cluster using your own keys, stored in Azure Key Vault, and gain unmatched security management, intelligent threat-detection, and actionable recommendations with Azure Security Center integration.

Operational Efficiency - AKS enables you to elastically add compute capacity with serverless Kubernetes in seconds without worrying about managing the infrastructure. It ensures higher availability using redundancies across availability zones, protecting applications from data center failures along with paired region deployment for disaster recovery. AKS also provides Real-time personalized recommendations to optimize your AKS deployments with Azure Advisor integration and detailed insights about workloads, container health, app telemetry, and real-time log analytics via Azure Monitor. For customers, a financially-backed opt-in service level agreement (SLA) with guaranteed uptime guarantees peace of mind and optimum cost savings options catered to your workload needs.

Unified Management - AKS acts as a central inventory and monitoring of the sprawling assets running anywhere from on-premises to edge and empowers you to consistently apply policies and role-based-access-controls (RBAC) for at-scale governance. With AKS you can deploy Kubernetes resources to all clusters using a GitOps-based workflow.

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