Container Groups 2 – PaaS Compute Options

Container Groups 2 – PaaS Compute Options

AKS is a completely platform-managed cluster, and you can easily create Kubernetes clusters in Azure and deploy your applications. AKS offloads the complex management and configuration tasks to Azure so that developers and administrators can focus on the application deployment. As mentioned earlier, the Kubernetes service is totally free, and you pay only for the number of nodes in the cluster. The following are the features of Azure Kubernetes Service:

Numerous Deployment Options  AKS offers multiple deployment options such as portal, command line, ARM templates, and pipelines. Further, you can use infrastructure-as-a-code solutions such as Terraform for deploying AKS clusters. During the cluster creation, the nodes are autoconfigured. You can also add extra add-ons such as Azure AD integration, container monitoring, and advanced networking if needed during the deployment process.

Identity and Access Control  RBAC is supported by AKS clusters. You can integrate the cluster with Azure AD, making it possible to configure access using Azure AD identities.

Logging and Monitoring  There are lot of third-party tools and solutions available for Kubernetes. AKS offers a built-in add-on called container monitoring to monitor the health of containers, nodes, and cluster. Using this add-on, you can retrieve rich performance metrics. This data will be stored in a Log Analytics workspace, which you can analyze using the Kusto Query Language.

Scaling  Based on the demand, the number of nodes can be increased or decreased; also you can configure the minimum number of nodes that the cluster will always be running.

Upgrades  Kubernetes also requires upgrades, and AKS offers several Kubernetes versions during the deployment. As a new version is released, you can plan your upgrade from the Azure portal or the CLI. During the upgrade process, the nodes are cordoned and drained. By this process, the running applications will be moved to another node during the upgrade process to avoid downtime.

HTTP Application Routing  By enabling HTTP application routing solutions, you can configure the ingress controller on your AKS cluster.

GPU Support  For solutions that run compute-intensive, graphics-intensive, and visualization workloads, AKS offers support for GPU-enabled nodes. You can select single or multi-GPU models for running these workloads.

Tooling  Being an open source solution, Kubernetes has a plethora of development and management solutions offered by different vendors. AKS supports all these tools natively without any additional configuration. Examples include Helm, Visual Studio Code extension for Kubernetes, etc. You can also leverage Azure Dev Spaces to run debug containers for testing purposes.

Virtual Network Integration  AKS clusters can be integrated to virtual networks by directly deploying to them. By doing so, every pod gets an IP address from the virtual network address space enabling the pods to communicate with other resources in the virtual network, resources across peered virtual networks, and resources in on-premises via ExpressRoute or VPN connections.

Image Repository  AKS supports Docker Hub, Azure Container Registry, or any other image repository that you maintain.