Hello folks,
Let me start with a simple question, What is Kubernetes?
Well according to its official document, “Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation”. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.
Or to be very simply said Kubernetes is a container management tool.
Firstly discuss about benefits of using Kubernetes.
Container deployment era: Containers are similar to VMs, but they have relaxed isolation properties to share the Operating System (OS) among the applications. Therefore, containers are considered lightweight. Similar to a VM, a container has its own filesystem, share of CPU, memory, process space, and more. As they are decoupled from the underlying infrastructure, they are portable across clouds and OS distributions.
(a) Service discovery and load balancing
(b) Storage orchestration
(c) Automated rollouts and rollbacks
(d) Automatic bin packing
(e) Secret and configuration management
(f)Resource isolation: predictable application performance.
(g)Resource utilization: high efficiency and density. etc,
So our next question is what is azure? and which service provides Kubernetes cluster?
According to Wikipedia Microsoft Azure, commonly referred to as Azure, is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through Microsoft-managed data centers.
Azure provides service in almost every domain including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) that can be used for services such as analytics, virtual computing, storage, networking, and much more.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
AKS allows you to quickly deploy a production ready Kubernetes cluster in Azure, it simplifies deploying a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure by offloading much of the complexity and operational overhead to Azure. As a hosted Kubernetes service, Azure handles critical tasks for you, like health monitoring and maintenance.
Since the Kubernetes masters are managed by Azure, you only manage and maintain the agent nodes. Thus, as a managed Kubernetes service, AKS is free; you only pay for the agent nodes within your clusters, not for the masters.
FEATURES OF AKS
→Security, Access, and Monitoring
→Clusters and Nodes
→Virtual Networks and Ingress
→ Development Tooling Integration, ETC…
USE CASES OF AKS!
(a)Easily migrating existing applications to Kubernetes
(b)Simplifying the deployment and management of microservices-based applications.
(c)Easily integrated DevOps.
(d)IoT device deployment and management on demand.
(e)Machine Learning model training with AKS.
(f)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.
(g)Azure Kubernetes Service is also applicable in many other use cases.
>>One of them is the ease of scaling by using AKS and Azure Container Instances. Also, you can find the applications of AKS for on-demand IoT device deployment and management.
>>AKS can provide scalable compute resources for IoT solutions according to demand.
>>AKS could also find applications in use cases that involve machine learning model training. Flexible tools in AKS such as Kubeflow and TensorFlow help in simplifying the training of machine learning models.
CASE STUDY OF KUBERNETES : Spotify
What is Spotify?
Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video streaming service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from artists all over the world.
>Choose what you want to listen to with Browse and Search.
>Get recommendations from personalized features, such as Discover >Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix.
>Build collections of music.
>See what friends, artists, and celebrities listen to.
>Create your own Radio stations.., etc.
Challenge
Launched in 2008, the audio-streaming platform has grown to over 200 million monthly active users across the world. “Our goal is to empower creators and enable a really immersive listening experience for all of the consumers that we have today — and hopefully the consumers we’ll have in the future,” says Jai Chakrabarti, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure and Operations. An early adopter of microservices and Docker, Spotify had containerized microservices running across its fleet of VMs with a homegrown container orchestration system called Helios. By late 2017, it became clear that “having a small team working on the features was just not as efficient as adopting something that was supported by a much bigger community,” he says
Solution
“We saw the amazing community that had grown up around Kubernetes, and we wanted to be part of that,” says Chakrabarti. Kubernetes was more feature-rich than Helios. Plus, “we wanted to benefit from added velocity and reduced cost, and also align with the rest of the industry on best practices and tools.” At the same time, the team wanted to contribute its expertise and influence in the flourishing Kubernetes community. The migration, which would happen in parallel with Helios running, could go smoothly because “Kubernetes fit very nicely as a complement and now as a replacement to Helios,” says Chakrabarti.
Impact
The team spent much of 2018 addressing the core technology issues required for a migration, which started late that year and is a big focus for 2019. “A small percentage of our fleet has been migrated to Kubernetes, and some of the things that we’ve heard from our internal teams are that they have less of a need to focus on manual capacity provisioning and more time to focus on delivering features for Spotify,” says Chakrabarti. The biggest service currently running on Kubernetes takes about 10 million requests per second as an aggregate service and benefits greatly from autoscaling, says Site Reliability Engineer James Wen. Plus, he adds, “Before, teams would have to wait for an hour to create a new service and get an operational host to run it in production, but with Kubernetes, they can do that on the order of seconds and minutes.” In addition, with Kubernetes’s bin-packing and multi-tenancy capabilities, CPU utilization has improved on average two- to threefold.
