What is Azure Kubernetes Service-What Is AKS and Why Do We Use It?

Despite the fact that Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestration engine for managing containerized workloads in production, the complexity of operating the technology has led to the demand for fully-managed Kubernetes services in recent years. Although Azure offers a variety of solutions, it is currently focusing most on Azure Kubernetes Service and will phase out its previous related services this year. In this Azure Kubernetes Service Tutorial blog, we will try to clear all our doubts regarding Kubernetes on Azure.

According to the Forbes, Microsoft Azure’s revenue has increased by more than 90% for four consecutive quarters because it provides what corporate clients want: Stability. This brand-new Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) makes it exceedingly simple to set up a Kubernetes cluster on the Azure cloud using the most recent version of the open source orchestration engine.

Microsoft’s AKS is aimed against Google, the firm that fostered Kubernetes before turning it over to the open source world. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) was one of the earliest public cloud managed Kubernetes products. Unlike Microsoft, Google charges a fixed fee of $0.15 per node for administering the GKE cluster with six or more nodes, resulting in a monthly rate of $110, which Microsoft is waiving with AKS. In this Azure Kubernetes Service Tutorial blog, we’ll go through the fundamentals of Kubernetes and AKS before digging into a real-world use case using Azure Kubernetes Service.

• What is Azure Kubernetes Service?
• Azure Kubernetes Service Benefits
• Azure Kubernetes Service Features
• Real Life Developments
• Azure Kubernetes Service Pricing
• Conclusion

 What is Azure Kubernetes Service?

AKS is an open-source fully managed container orchestration service that was released in June 2018 and is accessible on the Microsoft Azure public cloud for the deployment, scaling, and management of Docker containers and container-based applications in a cluster environment. Azure Kubernetes Service provides provisioning, scaling, and upgrading of resources as needed or demanded in the Kubernetes cluster with minimal downtime, and the best part is that you don’t need extensive knowledge and expertise in container orchestration to administer AKS.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Benefits

AKS is now incorporated with Azure Monitor for containers, making it easier to monitor and debug your Deployment. Some of the most great benefits are listed below:

• Efficient Resource Utilization:

The completely managed AKS allows for the simple deployment and maintenance of containerized apps, as well as effective resource use that elastically provisioned extra resources without the hassle of maintaining the Kubernetes infrastructure.

• Application development time is reduced:

The majority of the time was spent by developers on bug fixes. AKS shortens debugging time while handling patching, auto-upgrades, and self-healing, as well as simplifying container management. It certainly saves time, and developers will be able to focus on creating their products while being more productive.

• Security and compliance: 

One of the most significant features of modern apps and enterprises is cybersecurity. AKS connects with Azure Active Directory (AD) and provides users with on-demand access, significantly reducing threats and risks. AKS also complies with all standards and regulatory requirements, including System and Organization Controls (SOC), HIPAA, ISO, and PCI DSS.

•  Rapid Development and Integration:

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) enables auto-upgrades, monitoring, and scaling while reducing infrastructure maintenance, resulting in quicker development and integration. It also allows for the instant deployment of extra computing resources in Serverless Kubernetes without the need to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure.

• Supports Agile Project Management: 

One of the primary advantages of AKS is that it supports agile development programs such as Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery/Continuous Deployment (CD), and DevOps.

Azure Kubernetes Service Features

Microsoft Azure provides Azure Kubernetes Service, which facilitates managed Kubernetes cluster setup in the public cloud environment and also maintains managed Kubernetes service health and monitoring. Customers may manage the agent nodes and construct AKS clusters using the Azure interface or the Azure CLI. Advanced networking, monitoring, and Azure AD integration are among the many features that may be set. Let’s have a look at the features provided by Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS):

• Enterprise commitment in an open-source environment:

Microsoft has hired a large number of people in the last few years to make Kubernetes easier for businesses and developers to use and participate in open-source projects. Microsoft is the third major contributor to making Kubernetes more business-oriented, cloud-native, and accessible by bringing best practices and advanced learning from diverse customers and users to the Kubernetes community.

• Clusters and nodes:

Apps and supporting services are executed on Kubernetes nodes in AKS, and the AKS cluster is made up of one or more nodes. These AKS nodes are also hosted on Azure Virtual Machines. Nodes with the same configuration are clustered together and referred to as a node pool. Nodes in the Kubernetes cluster are scaled up and down based on the resources required by the cluster. As a result, the most visible components of your Azure Kubernetes architecture are nodes, clusters, and node pools.

• RBAC (role-based access control):

AKS seamlessly connects with Azure Active Directory (AD) to enable identity and group membership-based role-based access, security, and monitoring of Kubernetes architecture. You may also keep track of how your AKS and applications are performing.

• Development tool integration:

Another key element of AKS is that development tools such as Helm and Draft are easily integrated with AKS, allowing Azure Dev Spaces to give developers with a faster and iterative Kubernetes development experience. Containers may be operated and debugged directly in the Azure Kubernetes environment, reducing setup load. AKS can also interface with Azure Container Registry (ACR) to enable private storage for Docker images and supports the Docker image format. 

• Any workload may be run in Azure Kubernetes Service:

In the AKS system, you may orchestrate any form of task. You may migrate.NET applications to Windows Server containers, modernize Java applications in Linux containers, and execute microservices in Azure Kubernetes Service. In the cluster settings, AKS can execute any form of workload. Let’s move along in this Azure Kubernetes Service Tutorial, and look at a Real life Use Case of Azure Kubernetes Service.

Real Life Use-Case of Azure Kubernetes Service 

Logicworks,  a leading provider of cloud migration and managed cloud services for AWS and Azure, is a Microsoft Azure Gold Partner that assists businesses in migrating their apps to Azure. They shared their experience with one of their clients who wanted to deploy and grow their public-facing web application on AKS to address 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
    • Operational Excellence
      • Achieve high availability and fault tolerance through the use of availability zones
      • Elastically provision compute capacity without needing to automate and manage underlying infrastructure.
      • Gain insight into and visibility into your AKS environment through automatically configured control plane telemetry, log aggregation, and container health

Logicworks, with the assistance of AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), constructs a solution architecture that incorporates several common best practises to guarantee that they can fulfil the clients’ 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 auto-scaler 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.

Azure Kubernetes Service Pricing

AKS is a free container orchestration service with no charges for Kubernetes cluster administration. It is the most cost-effective container orchestration solution on the market since you only pay for the cloud resources you use, such as VMs, storage, and network resources. Microsoft Azure launched the Container Services calculator to evaluate the cost of utilized or necessary resources. All you need to do is sign up for a free account, deploy and manage your Kubernetes environment while developing microservices, deploying Kubernetes clusters, monitoring, and controlling your Kubernetes environment.

Conclusion

Businesses are rapidly migrating from on-premises to the cloud while developing and maintaining contemporary and cloud-native apps. Through this Azure Kubernetes Service Tutorial, we want to highlight that AKS is a powerful and cost-effective container orchestration service that enables you to build and manage containerized applications in seconds, with extra resources automatically allotted without the hassle of maintaining additional servers. As demand grows, AKS nodes scale out automatically. It offers various advantages, including security with role-based access, simple interface with other development tools, and the ability to execute any workload in the Kubernetes cluster environment. It also provides effective resource use, eliminates complications, is easily scaled-out, and migrates any existing workload to a containerized environment, with all containerized resources accessible via the AKS administration interface or AKS CLI. To know more about Azure, we offer Azure Cloud Engineer Course, which will help you get certified, and thus help you chase your dream work profile.

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