AZURE KUBERNETES SERVICE

Niharika Dhanik
3 min readJul 27, 2021

Welcome back to another blog. In this blog, I will be assembling my knowledge on industry use-cases of Azure Kubernetes Service and also elaborate its working. So let’s go…!

What is Kubernetes —

Kubernetes is open-source orchestration software for deploying, managing and scaling containers. Kubernetes orchestrates clusters of virtual machines and schedules containers to run on those virtual machines based on their available compute resources and the resource requirements of each container. Containers are grouped into pods, the basic operational unit for Kubernetes and those pods scale to your desired state. Kubernetes also automatically manages service discovery, incorporates load balancing, tracks resource allocation and scales based on compute utilization. And, it checks the health of individual resources and enables apps to self-heal by automatically restarting or replicating containers.

Kubernetes provides a way to schedule and deploy those containers — plus scale them to your desired state and manage their lifecycles. Use Kubernetes to implement your container-based applications in a portable, scalable and extensible way.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) —

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers server-less 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.

We can add a full CI/CD pipeline to your AKS clusters with automated routine tasks and set up a canary deployment strategy in just a few clicks. Detect failures early and optimize your pipelines with deep traceability into your deployments. Gain visibility into your environment with the Kubernetes resources view, control-plane telemetry, log aggregation and container health, accessible in the Azure portal and automatically configured for AKS clusters.

Orchestrate any type of workload running in the environment of your choice. Whether you want to move .NET applications to Windows Server containers, modernize Java applications in Linux containers, or run microservices applications in the public cloud, at the edge, in hybrid environments, or in your own datacenter through AKS services.

The benefits of using the AKS are as follows —

  • get started easily with smart defaults
  • create scenario-specific cluster configurations with a few clicks.
  • easily provision fully managed clusters with Prometheus based monitoring capabilities.
  • use Azure Advisor to optimize your Kubernetes deployments with real-time, personalized recommendations.
  • save costs by using deeply discounted capacity with Azure Spot.
  • elastically add compute capacity with server-less Kubernetes, in seconds.
  • achieve higher availability and protect applications from data center failures using availability zones.

Industry Use-cases —

WhiteSource is a Microsoft partner and global leader in open-source component security and compliance management, also referred to as Software Composition Analysis. The company has more than 700 customers worldwide, including many of the Fortune 100. To increase the portability of its solution, WhiteSource moved to containerized development using Kubernetes, and it chose Microsoft Azure and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) as its development and delivery platform. Using AKS, WhiteSource benefits from easy deployment, stellar support, and efficient management of Kubernetes clusters.

SoftBank Corp. IT division, plans, develops, and operates systems in the domestic telecom provider arena (mobile and landline networks). The IT Division constantly seeks to advance its engineers’ skills and approaches to problem solving and to proactively create learning opportunities in new technologies. Starting around 2017, the division introduced the agile development method, wanting to take advantage of its ability to give young engineers lots of practical experience. Now, a new success story is being written at SoftBank using advanced technology to improve engineers’ skills. A business department supervisor serves as “product owner,” and the IT Division coordinates closely with the business department in a process of agile development. An example of that success story is the development of Smartphone Adviser Reservation Tool (SMART), an application that supports the smartphone advisers who work in SoftBank shops throughout Japan. To develop SMART, SoftBank has adopted Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), a fully managed service for the open-source container orchestration system Kubernetes.

Thank you!!

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