Usecase of AZURE Kubernetes Service

Kubernetes is by far the most popular container orchestration tool, yet the complexities of managing the tool have led to the rise of fully-managed Kubernetes services over the past few years.

Although Azure supports multiple container tools, it’s now going all-in on Kubernetes and will deprecate its original offerings this year. The great part about cloud-based managed Kubernetes services like Azure Kubernetes Services is that it integrates natively with other Azure services, and you don’t have to worry about managing the availability of your underlying clusters, auto-scaling, or patching your underlying VMs.

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 :

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

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 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

When running containers in a production environment, containers need to be managed to ensure they are operating as expected in an effort to ensure there is no downtime.

• Container Orchestration: Without container orchestration, If a container was to go down and stop working, an engineer would need to know the container has failed and manually start a new one. Wouldn’t it be better if this was handled automatically by its own system? Kubernetes provides a robust declarative framework to run your containerized applications and services resiliently.
• Cloud Agnostic: Kubernetes has been designed and built to be used anywhere (public/private/hybrid clouds)
• Prevents Vendor Lock-In: Your containerized application and Kubernetes manifests will run the same way on any platform with minimal changes
• Increase Developer Agility and Faster Time-to-Market: Spend less time scripting deployment workflows and focus on developing. Kubernetes provides a declarative configuration that allows engineers to define how their service is to be run by Kubernetes, Kubernetes will then ensure the state of the application is maintained
• Cloud Aware: Kubernetes understands and supports a number of various clouds such as Google Cloud, Azure, AWS. This allows Kubernetes to instantiate various public cloud-based resources, such as instances, VMs, load balancers, public IPs, storage..etc.

Logicworks is a Microsoft Azure Gold Partner that helps companies migrate their applications to Azure. In the example below, one of our customers was looking to deploy and scale their public-facing web application on AKS in order to solve 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 computes capacity without needing to automate and manage the underlying infrastructure.
• Gain insight into and visibility into your AKS environment through automatically configured control plane telemetry, log aggregation, and container health

Conclusion:

Azure Kubernetes Service is a powerful service for running containers in the cloud. Best of all, you only pay for the VMs and other resources consumed, not for AKS itself, so it’s easy to try out.