Use-Cases of Azure Kubernetes Service In Industry
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In this article, we are going to discuss about the industry use cases of Azure Kubernetes Service.
What is Kubernetes ?
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.
Why you need Kubernetes and what it can do ?
Containers are a good way to bundle and run your applications. In a production environment, you need to manage the containers that run the applications and ensure that there is no downtime. For example, if a container goes down, another container needs to start. Wouldn’t it be easier if this behavior was handled by a system?
That’s how Kubernetes comes to the rescue! Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more. For example, Kubernetes can easily manage a canary deployment for your system.
Kubernetes provides you with:
👉🏻 Service discovery and load balancing
👉🏻 Storage orchestration
👉🏻 Automated rollouts and rollbacks
👉🏻 Automatic bin packing
👉🏻 Self-healing
👉🏻 Secret and configuration management
What is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) ?
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed container orchestration service, based on the open source Kubernetes system, which is available on the Microsoft Azure public cloud. An organization can use AKS to deploy, scale and manage Docker containers and container-based applications across a cluster of container hosts.
Rebalancing supply and demand in healthcare
Doctorlink is a digital start-up focused on solving some of the biggest problems in healthcare through the innovative development and deployment of technologies. Amongst its innovations it provides mobile apps to connect patients with healthcare providers for online and urgent triage, video consultation and health risk assessments.
More than 12 million patients use the Doctorlink app around the globe, including the NHS and insurance providers.
Helping the world respond to the pandemic
During the coronavirus pandemic, many more healthcare providers have approached Doctorlink with a view to leveraging its technology.
Cordelia Chuku, Head of Product & Design at Doctorlink, explains, “We’ve seen a vast increase in the number of healthcare providers looking to get technology embedded into their healthcare pathways with their patients.”
The choice of Microsoft Azure has helped in meeting demand
Keith Nurcombe, Managing Director UK NHS at Doctorlink, says the technology platform choices the business made early on are now paying off.
He says, “We always knew that a cloud-based solution was the only way to go. We’ve had to rollout 150 to 200 surgeries in a matter of a week or two so that ability to instantly scale with the Azure platform and the system around that has been absolutely crucial to us as a business.”
Scaling up quickly while maintaining the secure and regulated environment is vital. Nurcombe continues, “All of those things are the things that the Microsoft Azure platform offers Doctorlink: it allows us to scale. The security and the safety and the solidity of that Azure platform has been crucial to us.”
Engaging remotely with clients
The decision by the Doctorlink team to choose Microsoft as a technology partner has paid off in other ways too. Remote engagement with customers has been facilitated throughout the pandemic by the use of Microsoft Teams.
Azure Kubernetes Service Use Cases
Let see where AKS can be used -
- 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, if will scale-out additional pods automatically without any additional servers to manage in the Kubernetes environment.
- Data streaming: AKS can also be used to ingest and process real-time data streams with data points via sensors and perform quick analysis.
Companies using AKS :
47 companies reportedly use Azure Kubernetes Service in their tech stacks, including ViaVarejo, Durstexpress GmbH, and accuRx.
Finastra
With offices in over 60 countries, 10,000 staff and revenue exceeding $2 billion, Finastra is a significant Fintech force. Already an established leader in financial software and cloud solutions, its first platform offering, FusionFabric.cloud, launched to public cloud in June 2018. 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.”
The ease of integration we have experienced with Azure proves Microsoft has a genuine commitment to open source.
Hafslund Nett (Hafslund)
The power grid operator that serves 1.5 million Norwegians — determined that legacy systems for reading meter data needed higher capacity and that externally developed software was difficult to manage. To address the issue, Hafslund chose to develop its own meter-system software, using Microsoft Azure as its cloud platform, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to manage software containers, and Azure Monitor for containers to optimize container performance. Emphasizing the point about the company’s use of AKS, Heitmann says, “We are building our own new applications using microservices, and AKS is our choice for orchestrating their workloads.”
Pinterest’s Kubernetes story
With over 250 million monthly active users and serving over 10 billion recommendations every single day, that is huge. (The numbers might have changed now) As they knew these numbers are going to grow day by day, they began to realize the pain of scalability and performance issues.
Their initial strategy was to move their workload from EC2 instances to Docker containers; hence they first moved their services to Docker to free up engineering time spent on Puppet and to have an immutable infrastructure.
And then the next strategy was to move to Kubernetes:) Now they can take ideas from ideation to production in a matter of minutes whereas earlier they used to take hours or even days. They have cut down so much of overhead cost by utilizing Kubernetes and have removed a lot of manual work without making engineers worry about the underlying infrastructure.
Challenge
After eight years in existence, Pinterest had grown into 1,000 microservices and multiple layers of infrastructure and diverse set-up tools and platforms. In 2016 the company launched a roadmap towards a new compute platform, led by the vision of creating the fastest path from an idea to production, without making engineers worry about the underlying infrastructure.
Solution
The first phase involved moving services to Docker containers. Once these services went into production in early 2017, the team began looking at orchestration to help create efficiencies and manage them in a decentralized way. After an evaluation of various solutions, Pinterest went with Kubernetes.
