Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Shashwat pathak
3 min readMar 6, 2021

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Azure provides with a fully managed Kubernetes service that deploy and manage containerized applications more easily , provides enterprise-grade security and better control management .

It’s one of best services of Azure as it follows the model of Pay only for compute resources , i.e no charges for cluster management from Azure side , only pay for the resouces being used .
Thus increasing deployment security and reducing the cost of maintaining local infrastructure .

But what exactly is kubernetes ?

In short , Kubernetes (K8s) , is an basically an open-source tool for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.

Kubernetes Features

🔹 Automated rollouts and rollbacks
🔸Service discovery and load balancing
🔹Storage orchestration
🔸Secret and configuration management
🔹Horizontal scaling

For more (about k8s and use-case) — link

Common uses for AKS :

🔸Migrate your existing application to the cloud
🔹build a complex applications
🔸 microservices architecture
🔹Integration with machine learning
and much more …

All these features of AKS has helped the industry , and there are many big companies that are using AKS behind the scene :-
🔸Citigroup
🔹Splunk
🔸H&R Block
🔹Sapient
🔸Carmax
🔹Bosch
and more …

Let’s take a look at how AKS helped BOSCH to outcome a major real life problem

The wrong-way problem

Bosch continued to develop network safety and assistance systems that support drivers today and pave the way for fully automated driving.

The product team decided to solve this problem but did not know whether it was technically possible as for such a service to work commercially, it had to locate vehicles in real time with pinpoint precision .

Two major issues:
1).To get the last piece of information out of the noisy sensor data
2).To develop a highly scalable and ultra-flexible service to process the data in near real time.

But how to build a real-time data ingestion and processing pipeline capable of returning notifications to drivers within seconds ?. By using only a small technology stack .

The problem was speed. The team assumed that devices emitting location information , could eventually send thousands of data points to the solution per second, from all over Europe and eventually other countries

For that they needed lightning fast compute capable of filtering events and pushing a notification back to an end device within 10 seconds .

SOLUTION :-
They decided to offload the work of scaling and cluster maintenance to a managed service in a public cloud with a global reach , with Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service .

The key was orchestration. By orchestrating the deployment of containers using AKS, Bosch would get repeatable, manageable clusters of containers. Bosch already had a continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) process to use in producing the container images and orchestration.

The result: increased speed and reliability of deployments.

Using AKS was a strategic decision. We looked for a managed orchestrator so we could offload the work of patching, upgrading, and production-level services. That’s why we chose AKS — and it’s a very open, flexible platform.

~Hai Dang Le: technical lead (Bosch)

That’s how AKS helped to solve BOSCH real life problem.

❗❕for full story :- https://customers.microsoft.com/en-in/story/765209-bosch-increases-vehicle-safety-using-map-matching-algorithms-and-azure-kubernetes-service

🔰Connect with me -https://www.linkedin.com/in/shashwat-pathak-188321166/

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