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An Informative Guide to Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)

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An Informative Guide to Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)

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Ishikha rao
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8 min read

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is the easiest and quickest way for the developer to deploy and manage cloud-native applications in the Azure environment. It enables governance of the on-premises business ecosystem and unified management of multi-cloud Kubernetes clusters. To know more about AKS, let’s go through this blog.

What is Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)?

Microsoft Azure is a well-known cloud platform for different types and sizes of businesses, while Kubernetes is a modern-day approach that can help development teams efficiently and smoothly handle cloud-native applications in their production phase. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a platform that has brought both these solutions together and also allows users to create AKS clusters with ease.

AKS is a modern technology that is not only managed but also an open-source container orchestration service. It has been available in the market for users since June 2018. On the Microsoft Azure public cloud, this technology is easily accessible to the developers for handling, scaling, and deploying docker containers and applications that are based on containers in a Kubernetes cluster environment.

Basically, AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) comes with the capability to offer upgrades, provisioning, and scaling of resources as per the need of the application without creating any downtime in the Kubernetes cluster. Working with AKS is more preferable by developers because it doesn’t require expertise in container orchestration for AKS management.

AKS is known as an ideal choice for developers to create modern-age applications using Kubernetes on the Azure architecture. In this case, Azure Container Instances are considered the best choice for container deployment on the public cloud. These containers help in reducing the developer’s stress in deploying and running the apps.

Features of AKS

Microsoft Azure offers AKS that enables simplifying the deployment of Kubernetes clusters. It also helps in handling the health of the managed Kubernetes service. Here, customers can create AKS cluster by using Azure CLI or Azure portal. In addition to this, there are some additional features like networking, monitoring, and more that can also be configured. Let’s have a look into some popular features that Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) has to offer:

Role-based access control (RBAC)

AKS allows easy integration with Azure Active Directory (AD). This integration helps in offering security along with monitoring and role-based access. It also helps in monitoring the AKS performance in the applications.

Running workload in Azure Kubernetes Service

Developers can handle any type of AKS environment workload. With this, it is possible to move .NET apps to Windows Server containers, modernize Java apps in Linux containers, and run microservices in AKS. Basically, with the help of AKS, running workload in the Kubernetes cluster environment is possible.

Nodes and Kubernetes Clusters

In AKS, applications, and their services can easily run on nodes. Basically, it is a perfect combination of one or more than one node. And, these AKS nodes can run on virtual machines of Azure. Nodes can be grouped into node pools while getting configured. In addition to this, AKS Nodes are scaled up and down as per the requirement of resources in the AKS cluster. This is why Kubernetes cluster, nodes, and node pools are considered the most prominent components of AKS.

Open-source environment with enterprise commitment

Microsoft offered Kubernetes for easy development of the project and this is why it is known as the third highest contributor to making Kubernetes the most accessible, cloud-native platform.

Removes complexities

AKS helps in removing complexities regarding tasks like installation, implementation, maintenance, and security in Azure cloud architecture. It also limits the cost, so that users are not charged for imposing each Kubernetes cluster.

Integration of development tools

Integration of development tools is another feature that enables tools like Draft and Helm to enable Azure Dev Spaces to offer interactive Kubernetes development experience. This makes Kubernetes containers run smoothly and be debugged directly in the Azure environment without any configuration issues.

AKS is a technology that provides support for the Docker image format. To provide private storage for Docker images, it also enables integration with ACR (Azure Container Registry). With AKS, the development companies get the advantage of regular compliance with industry standards like HIPAA, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and System and Organization Controls (SOC).

Advantages of AKS

In recent times, Azure Kubernetes Service has competed with both Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). It is a solution that comes with various features like managing, monitoring, and scaling clusters in Azure Kubernetes. Along with these, it also offers benefits described below:

  • Security and compliance: For any application, cybersecurity is one of the most important aspects as when security is weak, it can affect the business operations. Therefore developers prefer AKS, as it offers on-demand access to reduce risks and threats by integrating the user’s system with Azure Active Directory (AD). Besides this, it offers regulatory requirements like PCI DSS, ISO, HIPAA, and System & Organization Controls (SOC).

  • Efficient resource utilization: The fully managed Azure Kubernetes Service can help developers ease up the management and deployment tasks when they are working on containerized applications. It also helps in efficiently using the resources without any issues.

  • Faster application development: Generally, it happens that software developers spend more time fixing bugs. But with the use of AKS, they can work faster by reducing the debugging time. It also helps them in managing auto upgrades, patching, and self-healing of container orchestration. Besides this, one can also save developers time, which can help them carry out other important and productive tasks.

  • Quicker development and integration: While working with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), developers can scale, monitor, and auto-upgrade the applications with minimal need for infrastructure maintenance. This helps in faster development and integration along with offering provisioning for additional computing resources within seconds.

Use Cases of AKS

Here are some use cases of Azure Kubernetes Service that can help you migrate your current application to the cloud and create complex applications with ease by using the latest technologies.

Data streaming scenario

With the use of Azure Kubernetes Service, the development teams can ingest and process real-time data with ease even if the data is huge. This data is gathered with the help of sensors. This approach also enables computations and fast analysis performance to create insights into complex scenarios quickly.

Bursting from AKS with ACI

AKS virtual node is used to offer pods inside the ACI. It can start within seconds and can help AKS run enough capacity of the workload in one go.

Microservices with AKS

Developers can make use of Azure Kubernetes Service to simplify the management and deployment of microservices-based architecture. It also enables load balancing, horizontal scaling, and self-healing.

Lift and shift to containers with AKS

AKS can also be used in the migration of existing business applications into containers. After that these containers can run in a fully managed Kubernetes service.

Secure DevOps for AKS

DevOps and Kubernetes work perfectly together which means that developers can use this combination to get a good balance between security and speed in the aa development process. Along with this, they can benefit from this integration in delivering faster code.

Machine learning model training with AKS

While working with large datasets, when training models are used, it can become a resource-intensive and complex task. For this, one can use tools like Kubeflow and TensorFlow that can simplify the training of machine learning models.

Kubernetes Core Concepts for AKS

Here are the most popular core concepts of Kubernetes AKS:

Kubernetes Cluster Architecture

Core concepts of managed Kubernetes cluster architecture are-

Control Plan

While creating an AKS cluster, a control plane gets automatically configured and created. It is free as a managed Azure resource will be pre-occupied by the user. This specifies that the users will have to only pay for the nodes that are attached to the AKS cluster. The control plane comes with some core Kubernetes components:

  • kube-scheduler: When the developer wants to develop or scale up the application, this component is used to specify what nodes will run.

  • etcd: It is used to maintain the state of the Kubernetes cluster.

  • kube-controller-manager: The Controller Manager looks after various smaller controllers that help developers perform actions like handling node operations and their replications.

  • ComponentDescriptionkube-apiserver: This component offers management tools for interaction.

Nodes

When the Kubernetes developer wants to run the application and support services for the same, Nodes in Kuberenetes are used. In the AKS cluster, at least one node is present and Kubernetes node components run on an Azure virtual machine (VM). Here are the components of nodes:

  • ComponentDescriptionkubelet: It enables the Kubernetes app developers to process the requests, schedule them, and run them from the control plane.

  • kube-proxy: It helps in managing virtual networking on each node.

Resource Reservation

To help the node function for clusters, AKS uses node resources. The use of it enables the development of discrepancy between the allocated resources and total resources of nodes in AKS. When the developer wants to find resources that are allocated by Node, then the following command will be required:

kubectl describe node [NODE_NAME]

In this case, when the developer wants to maintain the functionality and performance of a node, AKS helps in reserving resources on each node. Besides this, whenever a node grows, resources also grow. The resource can be reserved in two types:

CPU

When CPU is reserved, it is dependent on AKS cluster configuration and node type and this might result in less allocatable CPU.

Memory

Reserved memory can be used in AKS to sum two values.

Pricing

Here are the details of AKS pricing:

  • Pay as you go: In this type of payment approach, the payment for computing can be done as per the capacity by the second.

  • Reservations: When a developer wants to work with Azure services, they can get a discount when it is purchased by reservation.

  • Azure savings plan for computing: Compute services in AKS can be while saving money by committing to spend hourly amounts for years.

Conclusion

As seen in this blog, when organizations want to transform their in-premises business to the cloud quickly, Kubernetes, an open-source solution can be used. It helps in building, deploying, and maintaining cloud-native applications. And here Azure Kubernetes Service can be used to deploy and handle containerized applications within a few seconds. It offers efficient use of resources, helps in migrating existing workloads to a containerized environment, and removes complexities which makes it more popular.

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