From this blog, you will come to know about Azure, Kubernetes, and how AKS is solving the industrial use cases. We cover everything from basic to advanced level.
Kubernetes
It is also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Gives you the freedom to take advantage of on-premises, hybrid, or public cloud infrastructure, letting you effortlessly move workloads to where it matters to you.
Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
To learn more about k8s click here.
Microsoft Azure
It is a cloud computing platform for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and providing numerous services like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (Paas), Software as a service (SaaS) …etc. Huge integration with Microsoft products and services is a plus for Azure compared to other cloud providers like aws, digital ocean …etc.
It is the biggest cloud provider with data centers in 60+ regions, more than any other cloud provider.
If you are familiar with Microsoft products, Azure also has a similar interface and is easy to use. With a pay-as-you-go billing model and many benefits for long-term users and businesses up to 70% discount. Enterprises can save a lot of money on resources and maintenance.
Get started with Azure, they are providing $200 credit for professionals and $100 credit for students.
Getting started with Azure services is to create a Resource Group, we can also refer to it as a box. We have to add all the required resources to build the application into this box. This box can be managed by a team or individual.
Create a Resource Group
Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)
Azure has a service called Azure Kubernetes services, with one click we create a multi node cluster. Automate provisioning, upgrading, monitoring, and scaling with the fully managed Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Get serverless Kubernetes, a simpler development-to-production experience and enterprise-grade security and governance. Everything is managed by AKS.
To make Kubernetes easier for organisations to adopt and easier for developers to use. Microsoft has tripled the number of employees who participate in the open-source project in just three years. Now the third-leading corporate contributor, Microsoft works to make Kubernetes more enterprise-friendly and accessible by bringing the latest learnings and best practices from working with diverse customers to the Kubernetes community.
Creating Kubernetes services from azure.
The above image shows all the information about the k8s services.
Just enter the Kubernetes cluster name and click on the Review+Create button.
To know more about the k8s cluster and how to create it click here.
Your k8s cluster is created and access the cluster from anywhere using azure command-line interface or we have a special feature in azure is the bash and PowerShell integration you can click on top icon cloud shell to use the built-in terminal; in the back end it creates a Virtual machine to run the commands.
We must download azure CLI and kubectl tools if we are working from the local system. kubectl is command-line toolkit for managing k8s.
accessing cloud shell
Now our cluster is created and here I am using cloud shell
$ az aks listhttps://sainadh086.medium.com/industry-use-cases-of-openshift-from-experts-f5fcc0e72c0Will list all k8s cluster
To access the k8s cluster we need credentials, we can get the credentials from az command line, with help of this credentials we manage the k8s cluster for deploying applications.
I am taking a simple docker image for showcasing the use case.
$ az aks get-credentials — name <k8s_cluster_name> — resource-group <Resource_group_name> #getting the credentials$ az aks get-credentials — name MyCluster1 — resource-group KubernetesResource # actual command$ kubectl get pods # to check whether the cmd is working$ kubectl create deployment myd — image=vimal13/apache-webserver-php # we are taking a simple docker image for deloying$ kubectl describe deployment myd # it describes how our app is deployed$ kubectl expose deployment myd — port=80 — type=LoadBalancer # Exposing our app to the internet so everyone access it$ kubectl get svc # to see the ip of our app
Our deployed app
Up until now, we have discussed what is Kubernetes, azure, and AKS.
Industry use cases of AKS
Now we see how industries are using AKS services
Siemens Healthineers
About:- 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.
Digitalization is critical to technological progress in many industries, and healthcare is no exception. The healthcare industry needs ways to pull its data together, structure and analyze it, and draw conclusions that lead to improved ways of diagnosing patients and managing therapy. Siemens Healthineers is facilitating this transition with the Siemens Healthineers Digital Ecosystem.
Approach:- Siemens Healthineers has taken a containerized approach to application development, which means it uses virtualization at the application operating system level as opposed to launching virtual machines. The company deploys its distributed applications in Docker containers, orchestrates those containers using Kubernetes, and monitors and manages the environment with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Siemens Healthineers chose AKS because developers can quickly and easily work with their applications with minimal operations and maintenance overhead — provisioning, upgrading, and scaling resources without taking applications offline. With AKS, Siemens Healthineers can comfortably scale-out its Kubernetes environment and scale back again if it doesn’t need the compute power, creating very high-density deployments on a microservices level.
Siemens way of using AKS with other Azure services
Some of the words by Thomas Friese: Vice President, Digital Ecosystem Platform.
Using Azure Kubernetes Service puts us in a position to not only deploy our business logic in Docker containers, including the orchestration but also, through application gateway and API management, to easily manage the exposure and control and meter the access continuously.
Internal and external developers can independently release microservices at any point in time, which makes development faster and enables a continuous delivery approach completely based on Azure. We have set an astonishing speed for product development.
Finastra
About:- FusionFabric.cloud is Finastra’s ground-breaking Platform as a Service (PaaS) development ecosystem that is revolutionizing the future of banking. Banks, financial technology (fintech) providers, independent developers and Universities are leveraging its collaborative, open source environment to author innovative new applications for retail and corporate banking, payment processing, lending, treasury and capital markets. The result is banks and financial services institutions can quickly implement new product innovations on top of existing systems, in a secure environment, at significantly reduced operating costs.
Approach:- Kubernetes is at the heart of the FusionFabric.cloud platform, allowing the orchestration of Docker containers. Fintech applications can run and scale with ease on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), the next-generation service that builds on the Azure Container Service Engine (ACS). Currently on an ACS-engine, Finastra plans to migrate to AKS.
AKS brings a fundamental benefit to the development team at Finastra, as Grévy explains, “AKS gives us a pure Kubernetes and Docker imaging environment that we don’t have to manage ourselves. Our team has regained the resources to accelerate deployment and maximize our PaaS offering.”
BOSCH
About:- Bosch invests heavily in research and development (R&D), staffing more than 70,000 employees in R&D alone. These R&D staffers, along with 27,000 software and IT experts and 1,000 AI specialists, help maintain its position as Europe’s top provider of automotive solutions.
With headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, Bosch has partnered closely with the world’s automakers for decades. The company continues to develop networked safety and assistance systems that support drivers today and pave the way for fully automated driving.
Problem:- When Robert Bosch GmbH set out to solve the problem of drivers going the wrong way on highways, the goal was to save lives. Other services like this existed in Germany, but precision and speed cannot be compromised. Could Bosch get precise enough location data — in real-time — to do this? The company knew it had to try.
To solve this challenge Bosch team had to solve two major issues: first, to get the last piece of information out of the noisy sensor data; and second, to develop a highly scalable and ultra-flexible service to process the data in near real time. The question was how to build a real-time data ingestion and processing pipeline capable of returning notifications to drivers within seconds. Bosch Technical Lead Hai Dang Le developed a proof of concept using only a small technology stack, adding, “We really went for it!”
The problem was speed. Now they needed lightning-fast compute capable of filtering events and pushing a notification back to an end device within 10 seconds — the time estimated to make the solution viable.
The team decided to offload the work of scaling and cluster maintenance to a managed service in a public cloud with a global reach.
“We were looking for a cloud option where we could run our core businesshttps://sainadh086.medium.com/industry-use-cases-of-openshift-from-experts-f5fcc0e72c0 logic with zero changes on top of a new infrastructure,” explains Le.
Azure Kubernetes Service was the obvious choice. A team of Microsoft cloud solution architects worked closely with Bosch engineers, who provided valuable feedback to Azure product teams. Microsoft continues to work with Bosch teams around the world. Working together, they devised a solution that produced the speed Bosch needed.
Azure Services Workflow by Bosch
AKS also offered the simplicity of a managed Kubernetes service in the cloud. It provided the elastic provisioning that Bosch wanted, without the need to manage its own infrastructure. In addition, the developers did not have to rethink all their design decisions. Instead, they could take the core business logic developed on-premises using the open-source tools they knew and run the solution virtually as-is, within a faster infrastructure with a worldwide reach. The developers can deploy self-managed AKS clusters as needed, and they get the benefit of running their services within a secured network environment.
Result:- In addition, by running their solution on Azure and AKS, the average time to calculate whether a driver is going the wrong way could be improved to approximately 60 milliseconds.
Words of Hai Dang Le: technical lead
“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.”
Conclusion
We have discussed Kubernetes, Azure, and AKS. Also provided a small demo on using AKS and deploying the applications. Discussed industrial use cases of AKS.
If you have any doubts or any suggestions, please comment below.
