Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Highly available, secure, and fully managed Kubernetes service
Ship faster, operate with ease, and scale confidently
Deploy and manage containerized applications more easily with a fully managed Kubernetes service. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance. Unite your development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver, and scale applications with confidence.
Elastic provisioning of capacity without the need to manage the infrastructure, and with the ability to add event-driven autoscaling and triggers through KEDA
Faster end-to-end development experience with Azure Dev Spaces including integration with Visual Studio Code Kubernetes tools, Azure DevOps, and Azure Monitor
Advanced identity and access management using Azure Active Directory, and dynamic rules enforcement across multiple clusters with Azure Policy
Available in more regions than any other cloud provider
Accelerate containerized application development
Easily define, deploy, debug, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes applications, and automatically containerize your applications. Develop and test microservices-based applications without mocking up dependencies using Dev Spaces.
Add a full CI/CD pipeline to your AKS clusters with automated routine tasks, and set up a canary deployment strategy in just a few clicks. Detect failures early and optimize your pipelines with deep traceability into your deployments.
Gain visibility into your environment with control-plane telemetry, log aggregation, and container health, accessible in the Azure portal and automatically configured for AKS clusters.
Review DevOps fundamentals
Increased operational efficiency
Rely on built-in automated provisioning, repair, monitoring, and scaling. This checkbox-like experience helps you get up and running quickly and minimizes infrastructure maintenance.
- Easily provision fully managed clusters with automatically configured monitoring capabilities based on Prometheus.
- Use Azure Advisor to optimize your Kubernetes deployments with real-time, personalized recommendations based on our knowledge from working with thousands of enterprise customers.
- Elastically add compute capacity with serverless Kubernetes, in seconds, without worrying about managing the infrastructure.
- Achieve higher availability and protect applications from datacenter failures by using redundancies across availability zones.
Build on an enterprise-grade, more secure foundation
- Dynamically enforce guardrails defined in Azure Policy at the time of deployment or as part of CI/CD workflows. Deploy only validated images to your private container registry.
- Get fine-grained identity and access control to Kubernetes resources, from cluster to containers, using Azure Active Directory.
- Enforce pod security context and configure across multiple clusters with Azure Policy. Track, validate, and reconfigure easily. Get compliance reports for the entire environment with pod-level granularity.
- Achieve superior security with a hardened operating system image, automated patching, and disks encrypted using your own keys. Automate threat detection and remediation using advanced analytics from Azure Security Center.
- Use Azure Private Link to limit Kubernetes API server (control plane) access to your Azure virtual network. Help secure communication paths between namespaces and nodes with user-defined network policy.
Run any workload in the cloud, at the edge, or as a hybrid
Orchestrate any type of workload running in the environment of your choice. Whether you want to move .NET applications to Windows Server containers, modernize Java applications in Linux containers, or run microservices applications in the public cloud, at the edge, or in hybrid environments, Azure has the solution for you.
Learn about the Kubernetes core concepts and apply best practices in production.
Common uses for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Migrate your existing application to the cloud, build a complex application that uses machine learning, or take advantage of the agility offered by a microservices architecture.
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Easily migrate an application to container(s) and run it within AKS. Control access via integration with Azure Active Directory and access SLA-backed Azure services, such as Azure Database for MySQL, using Open Service Broker for Azure for your data needs.
- 1 Convert your application to container(s) and publish container image(s) to Azure Container Registry.
- 2 Using Azure Portal or command line, user deploys containers to AKS cluster
- 3 Use Azure Active Directory to control access to AKS resources.
- 4 Easily access SLA-backed Azure services, such as Azure Database for MySQL, using Open Service Broker for Azure.
- 5 Optionally, deploy AKS with a VNET virtual network.
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Use AKS to streamline horizontal scaling, self-healing, load balancing, and secret management.
- 1 Use an IDE, such as Visual Studio, to commit changes to GitHub.
- 2 GitHub triggers a new build on Azure DevOps
- 3 Azure DevOps packages microservices as containers and pushes them to the Azure Container Registry
- 4 Containers are deployed to AKS cluster
- 5 Azure Active Directory is used to secure access to the resources
- 6 Users access services via apps and websites
- 7 Administrators access the apps via a separate admin portal
- 8 Microservices use databases to store and retrieve information
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DevOps and Kubernetes are better together. Implementing secure DevOps together with Kubernetes on Azure, you can achieve the balance between speed and security and deliver code faster at scale. Put guardrails around the development processes using CI/CD with dynamic policy controls, and accelerate feedback loop with constant monitoring. Use Azure Pipelines to deliver fast while ensuring enforcement of critical policies with Azure Policy. Azure provides you real-time observability for your build and release pipelines, and the ability to apply compliance audit and reconfigurations.
- 1 Rapidly iterate, test, and debug different parts of an application together in the same Kubernetes cluster
- 2 Code is merged into a GitHub repository, after which automated builds and tests are run by Azure Pipelines
- 3 The container image is registered in Azure Container Registry
- 4 Kubernetes clusters are provisioned using tools like Terraform; Helm charts, installed by Terraform, define the desired state of app resources and configurations
- 5 Operators enforce policies to govern deployments to the AKS cluster
- 6 The release pipeline automatically executes a pre-defined deployment strategy with each code change
- 7 Policy enforcement and auditing is added to CI/CD pipeline using Azure Policy
- 8 App telemetry, container health monitoring, and real-time log analytics are obtained using Azure Monitor
- 9 Insights are used to address issues and fed into next sprint plans
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Use the AKS virtual node to provision pods inside Azure Container Instances that start in seconds. This enables AKS to run with just enough capacity for your average workload. As you run out of capacity in your AKS cluster, scale out additional pods in Azure Container Instances without additional servers to manage.
- 1 Register your container in Azure Container Registry
- 2 Container images are pulled from Azure Container Registry
- 3 AKS virtual node, a Virtual Kubelet implementation, provisions pods inside Azure Container Instances from AKS when traffic comes in spikes
- 4 AKS and Azure Container Instances containers write to a shared data store
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