Use Cases of Azure Kubernetes Services✨

Akanksha Chhattri
4 min readAug 20, 2021

AKS is ideal for easy migration of the existing application to containers and running them.

The access control comes through integration with Azure Active Directory. You can also access SLA-backed Azure Services such as Azure Database using OSBA (Open Service Broker for Azure).

AKS is also ideal for simplifying the deployment and management of applications based on microservices.

The streamlined horizontal scaling, secret management, self-healing, and load balancing by AKS provide the necessary support. AKS is also a reliable instrument for bringing DevOps and Kubernetes together.

AKS is ideal for secure DevOps implementation with Kubernetes and improves the speed and security of the development process.

The development processes are secure with the use of CI/CD supported by dynamic policy controls.

Constant monitoring can also help in accelerating the feedback loop. Azure pipelines can help in faster delivery alongside compliance with critical policies specified by Azure.

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 provision, 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.

Why Use Kubernetes?

When running containers in a production environment, containers need to be managed to ensure they are operating as expected in an effort to ensure there is no downtime.

Container Orchestration: Without container orchestration, If a container was to go down and stop working, an engineer would need to know the container has failed and manually start a new one. Wouldn’t it be better if this was handled automatically by its own system? Kubernetes provides a robust declarative framework to run your containerized applications and services resiliently.

Cloud Agnostic: Kubernetes has been designed and built to be used anywhere (public/private/hybrid clouds)

Prevents Vendor Lock-In: Your containerized application and Kubernetes manifests will run the same way on any platform with minimal changes.

Azure Kubernetes Service Use Cases

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, it will scale out additional pods automatically without any additional servers to manage in the Kubernetes environment.

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.

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