What is Azure Kubernetes Service?

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What is Azure Kubernetes service (AKS)?

Azure Kubernetes Service (also known as AKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that helps organizations deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications running on the Azure cloud. AKS became popular for eliminating the complexities that are found in regular Kubernetes, which enables organizations to focus on building and deploying new and better applications. Today, different organizations use AKS to deploy their applications.

AKS can be accessed in three different ways:

What are the benefits of using Azure AKS?

If any organization watching out to simplify container orchestration, security and compliance of your applications, and reducing your costs, then considering Azure AKS makes sense. Azure AKS can be proved profitable and a powerful tool offering several benefits to businesses of all types.

Here are 5 benefits of using Azure AKS:
  • Security and compliance: AKS offers numerous features such as role-based access control, network isolation, vulnerability scanning, and many others. It also complies with different industry security standards such as HIPAA, ISO27001, and SOC2.
  • Cost-effective: AKS will only charge for the resources that are being used with no upfront or extra charge. Azure AKS offers various pricing options that can be selected according to one’s budget.
  • Integrates with other Azure services: AKS provides organizations the privilege to interact with other Azure services like Azure Storage, Azure Compute, and Azure networking.
  • Availability: Techniques like load balancing, auto-scaling, and rolling updates used by Azure keep its system highly available. This enables businesses to keep their applications running without any breaks.
  • Simplified container orchestration: AKS automates various tasks that are involved in container orchestration, such as node provisioning, or scheduling. This allows developers to focus on the code and application, and not on the workload management.

Azure AKS Architecture

A control plane is created and configured automatically when an AKS cluster is created. The control plane cannot be accessed directly, as it is a managed resource. The control plane holds resources that can handle many tasks like maintaining the configuration of the Kubernetes cluster, overseeing minor actions like handling node operations, and many relative tasks. Azure AKS Architecture block diagram

When the size and the number of nodes are defined by the user, secure communication between the nodes and the control plane is configured.

An AKS cluster consists of at least one node. The node resources i.e. CPU and memory work helps the node function as a part of a cluster.

Two resource groups are covered under AKS deployments, the Kubernetes service and the node resource groups. Where the node resource holds every detail of the infrastructure resources associated with the cluster. A managed identity is required to configure other Azure resources.

Azure Kubernetes Service use cases

Below mentioned are a few use cases where Azure AKS can be used.
  • Migrate existing applications: Organizations can easily migrate their existing applications to containers and can run them on Azure Kubernetes. It is also possible to control access using Azure AD integration and SLA-based Azure services.
  • Bring DevOps and Kubernetes together: Azure AKS is reliable enough to bring Kubernetes and DevOps together and secure DevOps implementation with the help of Kubernetes. This in return improves the security and speed of the development process with CI/CD including dynamic policy controls.
  • Data streaming: Using AKS to process real-time data streams with data points using sensors and undergo quick analysis.
  • Build complex applications: Complex applications e.g. microservices applications can be built using AKS. Organizations can manage the complexity of such applications and also it helps in improving scalability and performance of it.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system and a powerful tool for automated deployment, scaling, and management related to containerized applications. It provides a portable, extensible, and scalable platform that can be used to manage containerized workloads on a variety of infrastructures including the cloud. Features such as declarative configuration, autoscaling, and health checks make it much more powerful to manage containerized applications.
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