Kubernetes -A Boon for Azure - AKS..!!

Day by Day, Due to the demanding Requirements of Organizations to solve the real world use-cases are required so the huge demand can be overcome by having a tool which is open source and that not only helps in automation but also solves the challenging demands of customers for Deploying their products.

So for solving that challenge, the well known Tool used for this is Kubernetes. Kubernetes is creating a decent buzz in tech circles for being an efficient and open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes is a HUGE project with a lot of code and functionalities. Kubernetes has various advantages so that’s why organizations prefer such tools which makes the work simpler for the industry to work together.

Imagine a situation where you have been using Docker for a little while, and have deployed on a few different servers. If application starts getting massive traffic, and you need to scale up fast so how will you go from 3 servers to 40 servers that you may require? And how will you decide which container should go where? How would you monitor all these containers and make sure they are restarted if they die? This is where Kubernetes comes in…!!

Features of Kubernetes:

1. Automated rollouts and rollbacks
2. Horizontal scaling
3. Self-healing
4. Service discovery and load balancing
5. Storage orchestration

For understanding the real World Use-case of Kubernetes refer to this Blog:

KUBERNETES IN AIR-FORCE DEFENCE SYSTEM..!!

Kubernetes is widely used in production environments to handle Docker containers and other container tools in a fault-tolerant manner. As an open-source product, it is available on various platforms and systems. Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon AWS offer official support for Kubernetes, so configuration changes to the cluster itself are not necessary.

So To make the deployment in easier and efficient way the quickest way to use Kubernetes on Azure and other Cloud Service Providers. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) manages your hosted Kubernetes environment, making it quick and easy to deploy and manage containerized applications without container orchestration expertise. It also eliminates the burden of ongoing operations and maintenance by provisioning, upgrading, and scaling resources on demand, without taking your applications offline. Azure DevOps helps in creating Docker images for faster deployments and reliability using the continuous build option.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) not only in the other countries but also available in India Central. It is the 19th Azure region to offer the service. AKS Deploy and manage containerised applications more easily with a fully managed Kubernetes service. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience and enterprise-grade security and governance. Unite your development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver and scale applications with confidence.

AKS is a free Azure service, so there is no charge for Kubernetes cluster management. AKS users are, however, billed for the underlying compute, storage, networking and other cloud resources consumed by the containers that comprise the application running within the Kubernetes cluster.

AKS has several features that are attractive for users of Microsoft Azure and provides the ability to easily create, maintain, scale, and monitor your AKS cluster. Here are some of the benefits of AKS touted by Microsoft:

• Elastic scalability
• Enterprise-grade security
• Integration with Visual Studio Code
• Active Directory integration
• Pay for compute only — no minimum monthly charge

AKS use cases

AKS usage is typically limited to container-based application deployment and management, but there are numerous use cases for the service within that scope.

For example, an organization could use AKS to automate and streamline the migration of applications into containers: first, it could move the application into a container, register the container with ACR, and then use AKS to launch the container into a preconfigured environment. Similarly, AKS can deploy, scale, and manage diverse groups of containers, which helps with the launch and operation of microservices-based applications.

AKS usage can complement agile software development paradigms, such as continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery/continuous deployment (CD) and Devops. For example, a developer could place a new container build into a repository, such as GitHub, move those builds into ACR, and then rely on AKS to launch the workload into operational containers.

Other uses for AKS involve the Internet of Things (IoT). The service, for instance, could help ensure adequate compute resources to process data from thousands, or even millions, of discrete IoT devices. Similarly, AKS can help ensure adequate compute for big data tasks, such as model training in machine learning (ML) environments.

AKS security, monitoring and compliance

AKS supports role based access control (RBAC) through Azure Active Directory (AD), which enables an administrator to tailor Kubernetes access to AD identity and group associations. Admins can monitor container health using processor and memory metrics collected from containers, Kubernetes nodes and other points in the infrastructure. Container logs are also collected and stored for more detailed analytics and troubleshooting. Monitoring data is available through the AKS management portal, AKS CLI and application programming interfaces (API).

Setting basic information for your Azure Kubernetes cluster

The first step of the Create Kubernetes cluster UI is to set up all of the basic information for your AKS cluster.

1. Select your Subscription and Resource group.
2. Enter a name for your cluster. The Kubernetes cluster name must be unique within the resource group you selected.
3. Select the Region your cluster will be deployed in.
4. Select the Kubernetes version. Kubernetes is open-source and releases new versions about 4 times a year so you can get out of date quickly. So recommended to use latest versions.
5. The DNS name prefix should be prefilled from the name you entered, but you are free to change it. This is used to generate a unique FQDN (fully qualified domain name) for cluster when it is created.
6. Select your Node size for the primary node pool. This is the size your Kubernetes worker nodes will be and directly correlates with the initial size of your Kubernetes cluster. If you are just testing then make sure to change this to a smaller instance size such as B2s. Otherwise, use the table in the Change size UI to determine which node type has the CPU and memory requirements you will need.
7. Select the Node count and scale it.

Authentication in AKS

AKS integrates seamlessly with Active Directory to manage AKS cluster access. First you configure the service principal which integrates with AD to delegate access to other Azure resources. You can either select an existing service principal or let Azure create a new one.

Next, you want to Enable RBAC. This allows you to use role-based access control in the cluster to provide granular access to cluster resources.

Scaling in AKS

AKS provides some unique features around scaling that could make it an attractive solution for dynamic workloads.

Virtual nodes are a very interesting feature for dynamic workloads. Virtual nodes lets you essentially schedule pods onto nodes that you do not manage and pay per second of execution time. This can speed up scaling time since you do not have to wait for the cluster autoscaler to detect a capacity need and then wait for a VM to launch for the cluster. Virtual nodes are not available in every region that AKS is available in, and the feature requires that your cluster is configured with Advanced Networking.

VM Scale Sets are the standard scaling option for AKS and do not incur any additional charges. This allows you to manage multiple node pools for your cluster so you can run different-sized instances simultaneously, which can be needed for workloads that have specific resource requirements for some pods, and basic requirements for other pods. This also allows you to set up the cluster autoscaler to add capacity when there is demand based on the running pods.

Networking in AKS

AKS offers several networking options that can speed up development or enable advanced cluster setups.

HTTP application routing allows you to easily access services deployed in the cluster by creating public DNS entries for your applications. This feature is not recommended for production clusters. Network configuration has two options: Basic and Advanced. Basic networking will use kubenet as the networking layer for your pods and only your nodes will receive private ip addresses in your vnet. Advanced networking is required for virtual node scaling, and uses Azure-CNI for the network layer, providing each pod with a private IP address in your vnet.

CPU, memory, and container monitoring in AKS

Azure Kubernetes service includes node CPU and memory monitoring at no additional cost. At cluster creation, you can optionally enable container monitoring. Container monitoring sends additional container metrics and logs using Log Analytics, which has fees based on the amount of data ingested. Simply enable container monitoring and then select or create a log analytics workspace to store the AKS data.

With container monitoring enabled you can view the CPU and memory usage per node, controller, or pod. You can view metrics or create alerts with Azure Monitor that are not available otherwise.

CONCLUSION

There are lot more use-cases which AKS is solving to fulfill the demands and solve the challenges of various Organizations to deploy their products easily and Efficiently..!!

So Through this Blog We can say that how Azure Kubernetes service is working as Leader for solving the challenges of the society by deploying the applications of customers with full reliable and secure way..!!