☁️ Azure Kubernetes Services(AKS) : Industry Use Cases ☸️
Deploy and manage containerized 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.
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
To know more about Kubernetes refer to my article
https://hrishabhsharma183.medium.com/kubernetes-revolutionizing-industries-35dab215bf9e
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.
Azure Kubernetes Service Benefits
Azure Kubernetes Service is currently competing with both Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). It offers numerous features such as creating, managing, scaling, and monitoring Azure Kubernetes Clusters, which is attractive for users of Microsoft Azure. 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 Serverless Kubernetes within seconds without worrying about managing the Kubernetes infrastructure.
Azure Kubernetes Service Use Cases
We’ll take a look at different use cases where AKS can be used :
· Migration of existing applications: You can easily migrate existing apps to containers and run them with Azure Kubernetes Service. You can also control access via Azure AD integration and SLA-based Azure Services like Azure Database using Open Service Broker for Azure (OSBA).
· Simplifying the configuration and management of microservices-based Apps: You can also simplify the development and management of microservices-based apps as well as streamline load balancing, horizontal scaling, self-healing, and secret management with AKS.
· Bringing DevOps and Kubernetes together: AKS is also a reliable resource to bring Kubernetes and DevOps together for securing DevOps implementation with Kubernetes. Bringing both together, it improves the security and speed of the development process with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) with dynamic policy controls.
· Ease of scaling: AKS can also be applied in many other use cases such as ease of scaling by using Azure Container Instances (ACI) and AKS. By doing this, you can use AKS virtual node to provision pods inside Azure Container Instance (ACI) that start within a few seconds and enables AKS to run with required resources. If your AKS cluster is run out of resources, if will scale-out additional pods automatically without any additional servers to manage in the Kubernetes environment.
· Data streaming: AKS can also be used to ingest and process real-time data streams with data points via sensors and perform quick analysis.
✦ Hafslund Nett: Case Study
Hafslund Nett (Hafslund) — the power grid operator that serves 1.5 million Norwegians — determined that legacy systems for reading meter data needed higher capacity and that externally developed software was difficult to manage. To address the issue, Hafslund chose to develop its own meter-system software, using Microsoft Azure as its cloud platform, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to manage software containers, and Azure Monitor for containers to optimize container performance. Hafslund IT staff will soon save time managing their improved systems, and customers will benefit from higher reliability.
“We wanted a platform to speed development and testing but do it safely, without losing control over security and performance. That’s why Azure and AKS are the perfect fit for us”.
Ståle Heitmann: Chief Technology Officer
Hafslund Nett.
✦ Siemens Healthineers : Case Study
- Helping millions of patients benefit from better care? All in a day’s work for worldwide healthcare technology company Siemens Healthineers. 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.
1. Moving to the cloud for better applications while protecting patient health data
Providing solutions to a worldwide customer base can be complicated and of less value in regard to data-aggregation and analytics capabilities if systems need to be installed on-premises, so Siemens Healthineers relies on the cloud.
2. Using Azure services to streamline development processes
With a solid, dependable cloud platform in place, Siemens Healthineers is focusing on speeding development and implementing a continuous delivery approach. The company not only provides its own software products, but it has also decided to encourage other developers to use its infrastructure to deliver solutions and services and bring even more value to customers. This requires rethinking the development processes.
3. Making the best use of data and devices
Siemens Healthineers has brought in additional Azure capabilities that help deliver insights from data and offer the best possible tools for the healthcare industry. For example, the company has made great use of Azure Cosmos DB. “Azure Cosmos DB is an amazing technology,” says Gossler. “The biggest benefit for us is that we can have one database for anonymous data that is replicated worldwide into all regions that are relevant for us, in a consistency model that perfectly fits our needs.
4. Delivering applications that optimize the business
The company’s use of Azure services has a direct impact on the development life cycle, but those improvements benefit the business side as well. Siemens Healthineers is reducing the total cost of ownership of its production workloads, creating more flexibility in the business models and pricing structure it can offer its customers.
Technical addendum:
While Siemens Healthineers relies heavily on Azure-related features, it also depends on other technologies-including open source-to make its digital ecosystem shine as both a development environment and a delivery platform for innovative functionality. Here are a few of the other key tools, with Gossler’s thoughts on the strengths each brings to the ecosystem.
“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
