Overview of Azure Kubernetes Services
Published: 2023-09-27 16:36:14

## What is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?

Azure Kubernetes Service is Microsoft Azure’s managed Kubernetes solution that lets you run and manage containerized applications in the cloud. As a hosted Kubernetes service, Azure handles critical tasks like health monitoring and maintenance. 

Since Kubernetes masters are managed by Azure, you only manage and maintain the agent nodes. Azure Kubernetes Service offers provisioning, scaling and upgrades of resources as per requirement or demand without any downtime in the Kubernetes cluster.

## Azure Kubernetes Service Architecture

When a user creates an AKS cluster, a control plane is automatically created and configured. The control plane is a managed Azure resource the user cannot access directly. The control plane contains resources that provide interaction for management tools, maintain the state and configuration of the Kubernetes cluster, schedule and specify which nodes run the workload and oversee smaller actions, such as replicating Kubernetes pods or handling node operations.

Azure Kubernetes Service deployments covers two resource groups. One group is the Kubernetes service resource, while the other is the node resource group. The node resource group contains all of the infrastructure resources associated with the cluster. 

## Advantages of Azure Kubernetes Service

Azure Kubernetes Service offers numerous features such as creating, managing, scaling and monitoring Azure Kubernetes Clusters. Following are some of the advantages of using Azure Kubernetes Services:

### Smooth development experience

Azure Kubernetes Service reduces the debugging time while handling patching, auto-upgrades, 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.

### Efficient utilization of resources
 
A fully managed Azure Kubernetes Service 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.

### Quicker development and integration

Azure Kubernetes Service supports auto-upgrades, monitoring, and scaling and helps in minimizing the infrastructure maintenance that leads to comparatively faster development and integration.

### Security and compliance

Cybersecurity is one of the most important aspects of modern applications and businesses. Azure Kubernetes Service 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.

## Azure Kubernetes Service Features

Microsoft Azure offers Azure Kubernetes Service that simplifies managed Kubernetes cluster deployment in the public cloud environment and also manages health and monitoring of managed Kubernetes service. Customers can create AKS clusters using the Azure portal or Azure CLI and can manage the agent nodes.

A template-based deployment using Terraform can also be chosen to deploy the AKS cluster that manages the auto-configuration of master and worker nodes of the Kubernetes cluster. Some additional features such as advanced networking, monitoring and Azure AD integration can also be configured. Let’s take a look into the features that Azure Kubernetes Service offers:

- **Open-source environment:** Microsoft has inducted number of employees in last couple of years to make Kubernetes easier for the businesses and developers to use and participate in open-source projects and became the third giant contributor to make Kubernetes more business-oriented, cloud-native, and accessible by bringing the best practices and advanced learning with diverse customers and users to the Kubernetes community.


- **Nodes and clusters:** In AKS, apps and supporting services are run on Kubernetes nodes and the AKS cluster is a combination of one or more than one node. These AKS nodes are run on Azure Virtual Machines. Nodes that are configured with the same configuration are grouped together and are called node pool. Nodes in the Kubernetes cluster are scaled-up and scaled-down according to the resources that are required in the cluster. So, nodes, clusters and node pools are the most prominent components of your Azure Kubernetes environment.


- **Role-based access control:** AKS easily integrates with Azure Active Directory (AD) to provide role-based access, security and monitoring of Kubernetes architecture on the basis of identity and group membership. 


- **Integration of development tools:** Another important feature of AKS is the development tools such as Helm and Draft are seamlessly integrated with AKS where Azure Dev Spaces can provide a quicker and iterative Kubernetes development experience to the developers. Containers can be run and debugged directly in Azure Kubernetes environment with less stress on the configuration.


- **Ability to run any workload:** You can orchestrate any type of workload running in the AKS environment. You can move .NET apps to Windows Server containers, modernize Java apps in Linux containers or run microservices in Azure Kubernetes Service. 


- **Simplified User Experience:** AKS removes your implementation, installation, maintenance and security complexities in Azure cloud architecture. It also reduces substantial costs where no per-cluster charges are being imposed on you.

## Azure Kubernetes Service 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.

- You 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/continuous delivery 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.
- Data streaming can be made easier with AKS as well. The tool can be used to process real-time data streams in order to perform a quick analysis.
- 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 environments.

## Summary

Azure Kubernetes Service is a powerful service for running containers in the cloud. 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. Best of all, you only pay for the VMs and other resources consumed, not for Azure Kubernetes Service itself, so it’s easy to try out.