Industry use cases of Azure Kubernetes Service
Before learning about AKS, let’s talk a little about what is Azure and Kubernetes first?
What is Azure?
Azure, is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers. The Azure cloud platform is more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life — to solve today’s challenges and create the future. Build, run and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice.
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes automates operational tasks of container management and includes built-in commands for deploying applications, rolling out changes to your applications, scaling your applications up and down to fit changing needs, monitoring your applications, and more — making it easier to manage applications.
Now, That we know little bit about Microsoft Azure and Kubernetes. Let’s dive deep into one of the product of Azure i.e. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Azure Kubernetes Service
Azure Kubernetes Service 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. AKS is a robust and cost-effective container orchestration service that helps you to deploy and manage containerized applications in seconds where additional resources are assigned automatically without the headache of managing additional servers.
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.
Azure Kubernetes Service Benefits
AKS is competing with both Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The following are some benefits offered by AKS:
- Efficient resource utilization: The fully managed AKS offers easy deployment and management of containerized applications with efficient resource utilization that elastically provisions additional resources without the headache of managing the Kubernetes infrastructure.
- Faster application development: Developers spent most of the time on bug-fixing. AKS reduces the debugging time while handling patching, auto-upgrades, and self-healing and simplifies the container orchestration. It definitely saves a lot of time and developers will focus on developing their apps while remaining more productive.
- Security and compliance: Cybersecurity is one of the most important aspects of modern applications and businesses. AKS integrates with Azure Active Directory (AD) and offers on-demand access to the users to greatly reduce threats and risks. AKS is also completely compliant with the standards and regulatory requirements such as System and Organization Controls (SOC), HIPAA, ISO, and PCI DSS.
- Quicker development and integration: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) supports auto-upgrades, monitoring, and scaling and helps in minimizing the infrastructure maintenance that leads to comparatively faster development and integration. It also supports provisioning additional compute resources in Server less Kubernetes within seconds without worrying about managing the Kubernetes infrastructure.
Features of Azure Kubernetes Service
- Elastic provisioning of capacity without the need to manage the infrastructure and with the ability to add event-driven auto-scaling and triggers through KEDA
- Available in more regions than any other cloud provider
- AKS streamlines horizontal scaling, self-healing, load balancing, secret management.
- Most comprehensive authentication and authorization capabilities using Azure Active Directory and dynamic rules enforcement across multiple clusters with Azure Policy
- Faster end-to-end development
Some additional features such as advanced networking, monitoring, and Azure AD integration can also be configured.
Siemens Healthineers Case Study On AKS
Siemens Healthineers is leading the digitalization of healthcare with its Digital Ecosystem, which helps health providers and solution developers bring more value to the delivery of care, ultimately improving the quality of insights derived from healthcare data. Siemens Healthineers uses Microsoft Azure to make solutions more accessible, and it uses Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and other tools for a fast, efficient, and competitive development pipeline.
Using Azure Kubernetes Service puts us into a position to not only deploy our business logic in Docker containers, including the orchestration, but also … to easily manage the exposure and control and meter the access.
— Thomas Gossler: Lead Architect, Digital Ecosystem Platform, Siemens Healthineers
Digitalization is critical to technological progress in many industries, and healthcare is no exception. The healthcare industry needs ways to pull its data together, structure and analyze it, and draw conclusions that lead to improved ways of diagnosing patients and managing therapy. Siemens Healthineers is facilitating this transition with the Siemens Healthineers Digital Ecosystem.
Siemens Healthineers has taken a containerized approach to application development, which means it uses virtualization at the application operating system level as opposed to launching virtual machines. The company deploys its distributed applications in Docker containers, orchestrates those containers using Kubernetes, and monitors and manages the environment with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Siemens Healthineers chose AKS because developers can quickly and easily work with their applications with minimal operations and maintenance overhead — provisioning, upgrading, and scaling resources without taking applications offline. With AKS, Siemens Healthineers can comfortably scale out its Kubernetes environment and scale back again if it doesn’t need the compute power, creating very high-density deployments on a microservices level.
Conclusion
Businesses are transforming from on-premises to the cloud very quickly while building and managing modern and cloud-native applications. Kubernetes is one of the solutions that is open-sourced and supports building and deploying cloud-native apps with complete orchestration. Azure Kubernetes Service is a robust and cost-effective container orchestration service that helps you to deploy and manage containerized applications in seconds where additional resources are assigned automatically without the headache of managing additional servers.
Thank you !
Credits :- Google, Azure, Vimal Daga Sir, ….
