How Companies are get benefitted from Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)

What is kubernetes?

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.

The name Kubernetes originates from Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot. K8s as an abbreviation results from counting the eight letters between the "K" and the "s". Google open-sourced the Kubernetes project in 2014. Kubernetes combines over 15 years of Google's experience running production workloads at scale with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community

Why you need Kubernetes and what it can do?

Containers are a good way to bundle and run your applications. In a production environment, you need to manage the containers that run the applications and ensure that there is no downtime. For example, if a container goes down, another container needs to start. Wouldn't it be easier if this behavior was handled by a system?

That's how Kubernetes comes to the rescue! Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more. For example, Kubernetes can easily manage a canary deployment for your system.

Kubernetes provides you with:

• Service discovery and load balancing Kubernetes can expose a container using the DNS name or using their own IP address. If traffic to a container is high, Kubernetes is able to load balance and distribute the network traffic so that the deployment is stable.
• Storage orchestration Kubernetes allows you to automatically mount a storage system of your choice, such as local storages, public cloud providers, and more.
• Automated rollouts and rollbacks You can describe the desired state for your deployed containers using Kubernetes, and it can change the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. For example, you can automate Kubernetes to create new containers for your deployment, remove existing containers and adopt all their resources to the new container.
• Automatic bin packing You provide Kubernetes with a cluster of nodes that it can use to run containerized tasks. You tell Kubernetes how much CPU and memory (RAM) each container needs. Kubernetes can fit containers onto your nodes to make the best use of your resources.
• Self-healing Kubernetes restarts containers that fail, replaces containers, kills containers that don't respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn't advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve.
• Secret and configuration management Kubernetes lets you store and manage sensitive information, such as passwords, OAuth tokens, and SSH keys. You can deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your container images, and without exposing secrets in your stack configuration

What is Azure Kubernetes Service?

Microsoft Azure is a world-renown cloud platform for SMBs to large scale business, while Kubernetes is a modern-day approach that is rapidly becoming the regular methodology to manage cloud-native applications in a production environment. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) has brought both solutions together that allow customers to create fully-managed Kubernetes clusters quickly and easily.

AKS is an open-source fully managed container orchestration service that became available in June 2018 and is available on the Microsoft Azure public cloud that can be used to deploy, scale and manage Docker containers and container-based applications in a cluster environment.

Azure Kubernetes Service offers provisioning, scaling, and upgrades of resources as per requirement or demand without any downtime in the Kubernetes cluster and the best thing about AKS is that you don’t require deep knowledge and expertise in container orchestration to manage AKS.

AKS is certainly an ideal platform for developers to develop their modern applications using Kubernetes on the Azure architecture where Azure Container Instances are the pretty right choice to deploy containers on the public cloud. The Azure Container Instances help in reducing the stress on developers to deploy and run their applications on Kubernetes architecture.

The Benefits

Containers help to move applications and their dependencies between environments, and Kubernetes does its job best as it orchestrates containerization, effectively. Azure Kubernetes Service is considered to be the best way to simplify and streamline Kubernetes and hence, you are able to scale your application development effectively, with great agility.

1. Accelerated Application Development

Most of the developer’s time is spent on bug-fixing. AKS reduces the wastage of time due to debugging and handles auto-upgrades, patching and self-healing. With the help of AKS, container orchestration is simplified. You save a lot of time and it enables your developers to remain more productive as they are able to combat their biggest time-sinks.

2. Supports Agile Project Management

One of the key benefits of AKS is that it supports agile development programs – Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery/ Continuous Deployment (CD) and DevOps.

3. Security and Compliance

Cyber security is of utmost importance. AKS protects your business by enabling administrators to tailor access to Azure Active Directory (AD) and identity and group identities. When people are provided only the access that they need, the threat is greatly reduced. AKS is also, totally compliant. It meets the regulatory requirements of System and Organization Controls (SOC), as well as being compliant with ISO, HIPAA and HITRUST.

4. Ease of Application and Efficient Resource Utilization

The fully managed Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) makes deploying and managing containerized applications easy. Efficient resource utilization paves the way for elastic provisioning of additional capacity without the need to manage the infrastructure.

5. Faster End-to-end Development and Integration

AKS helps in minimizing infrastructure maintenance, using automated upgrades, repair, monitoring and scaling. This leads to faster development and integration. It helps in provisioning additional compute capacity in Serverless Kubernetes in a matter of seconds, without worrying about how to manage the infrastructure.

6. Run any Workload in the Cloud

You are able to orchestrate any type of workload running in the environment of your choice. You can move .NET applications to Windows Server containers or modernize Java applications in Linux containers and also, run microservices applications in the public cloud. AKS has the solution for you.

7. Removes Complexities and Reduces Expenditure

AKS helps in removing the complexities with regard to implementing, installing, maintaining and securing Kubernetes in Azure. There is also, a substantial reduction in expenditures as there are no per-cluster charges levied on you.

8. Using only the Resources needed 

AKS is considered to be a flexible system that adapts to use only the resources that you need. If you need more resources, then all you need to do is click a button and let the elasticity of Azure containers do the rest. This enables reduction in cost, easier scaling and faster start-up speed.

Companies using AKS.

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