Microsoft Azure is world-famous for its “unlimited potential” as well as “unlimited possibilities”. It is a leading cloud computing player. Kubernetes, a new way to manage cloud-native software within a production environment, is becoming an increasingly popular technique.
Azure Kubernetes Service is Microsoft’s most popular offering for running containers on Azure. Although Kubernetes is easy to use, it can be difficult to set up a cluster. Microsoft does all the hard work by managing the cluster and setting it up.
Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), enables customers to quickly and efficiently create fully operated Kubernetes clusters. Are you interested in learning about AKS’s different aspects? Let’s start with the basics!
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes, an open-source platform that manages and orchestrates containerized workloads, is extensible and scalable. Kubernetes abstracts dynamic containers management functions and provides declarative configuration to orchestrate containers across different computing environments. This orchestration tool offers the same flexibility and ease of use as platform as a Service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Containerised applications require multiple containers to be deployed around many machines. It can be difficult to keep them running. Kubernetes allows you to schedule and deploy containers. You can also scale them to the desired status and manage their lifecycles. Kubernetes lets you build container-based applications that are lightweight, scalable, extensible, and extensible.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Azure Kubernetes Service makes it easier for you to deploy managed Kubernetes clusters in Azure by offloading the operational overhead to Azure. Azure is a hosted Kubernetes service that performs critical tasks such as health management and maintenance. Azure handles the Kubernetes masters so you only have control over the agent nodes. AKS is completely free. You only need to pay for the agent cluster nodes.
Azure Kubernetes Service offers serverless Kubernetes and integrated continuous integration/continuous distribution (CI/CD) experience. Enterprise-grade security and governance are also available. To build your cluster, you can either use the Azure portal (or the Azure CLI).
You can also use Resource Manager templates to speed up cluster creation. AKS offers the benefits of open-source Kubernetes, without the overhead and hassle of running our own Kubernetes cluster.
Important Features
First, Azure Kubernetes Service allows you to elastically provision capacity by incorporating event-driven autoscaling triggers from KEDA.
Second, Azure DevOps tools, Visual Studio Code Kubernetes, and Azure Monitor provide a faster end-to-end development experience.
Azure Active Directory also has the strongest authentication and authorisation capabilities. It also offers dynamic rules enforcement across different clusters with Azure Policies.
Azure Kubernetes Service can be accessed in more areas than any other cloud services.
Azure Kubernetes Service Key Concepts
Sign up for an Azure account to get started with Azure Kubernetes service. Then, explore the core Kubernetesinfrastructure componentsand workload resources. These tutorials will help you deploy and run AKS applications. Before you start, make sure you have a solid understanding of AKS’s key concepts. These are the key concepts that will help you to improve your understanding before you start using Azure Kubernetes Service.
Access, security and monitoring
Microsoft Documentation: Identity management and security management
AKS allows integration with Azure AD for better management and security.
Use Kubernetes role-based access control (Kubernetes RBAC).
Monitor the health of your cluster’s resources and clusters
Kubernetes RBAC manages access to Kubernetes namespaces and services. AKS supports it to restrict access to cluster resources. An AKS cluster can also be configured to integrate into Azure AD. Azure AD integration allows you to set up Kubernetes access using existing identities and group membership. Azure Monitor for Container Health tracks memory and processor performance metrics from containers and nodes within your AKS cluster. It also collects data from deployed applications and controllers.
Clusters and nodes
Microsoft Documentation: Cluster node, pod scaling
Azure virtual machines host AKS nodes. AKS nodes allow you to connect storage to nodes, pods, update cluster components, use GPUs with AKS nodes, and connect storage to nodes, pods, and other nodes. AKS can run multiple node pools in Kubernetes clusters. This will support mixed operating systems as well as Windows Server containers. AKS offers a variety Kubernetes models.
As new versions of AKS become accessible, you can update the cluster via the Azure portal or Azure CLI. For persistent data, you can mount dynamic or static storage volumes to support your application workloads. You can also use storage backed Azure Disks to access one pod or Azure Files to access multiple, concurrent pods depending on how many are connected.
Ingress and virtual networks
Microsoft Documentation: Ingress with HTTP Application Routing
A virtual network can be used to deploy an AKS cluster. Each pod in the cluster receives an IP address and can communicate directly with the virtual network.
Other pods are also included in the cluster
Other nodes in a virtual network
Pods can connect over ExpressRoute and site-to-site VPN connections to other services that are peered virtual networks as well as on-premises network.
The HTTP application routing addon makes it easy for you to access applications that have been deployed on your AKS cluster. The HTTP application routing solution