Microsoft Azure Gets The Managed Kubernetes Service
Microsoft has announced the availability of managed Kubernetes service for Azure customers. This brand-new service dubbed as Azure Container Service (AKS), makes it extremely easy to provision a Kubernetes cluster in the public cloud running the latest version of the open source orchestration engine.
Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestration engine for managing containerized workloads in production. Prior to the launch of AKS, Azure customers could still run Kubernetes in Azure. But that involved managing and maintaining the cluster infrastructure with very little intervention from Microsoft. AKS takes the pain out of running Kubernetes cluster in the cloud by making it easy to maintain and upgrade the infrastructure. Microsoft is committed to bringing the most recent version of Kubernetes to AKS. With the Kubernetes community shipping a new version almost every quarter, customers will be able to exploit the new features by moving to the latest version.
To appreciate the real value of managed Kubernetes offerings such as AKS, we need to understand the high-level architecture of Kubernetes.
Every Kubernetes cluster has two set of servers – master and nodes. The master servers run the management layer of the cluster that is responsible for ensuring the availability of applications. Each time an application is deployed or scaled, the request first goes to one of the master servers, which will perform the operation. The master servers expose the API utilized by the tools that deal with application deployment.
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Janakiram MSV is an analyst, advisor, and architect. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.