Industry Usecases of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offered by the microsoft Azure cloud…
Azure Kubernetes Service is the service offered by the Azure cloud which helps their customer to provision the OS on virtual machines. This service helps the customer is creating entire kubernetes cluster just in few mouse clicks and good thing about this AKS service is it is fully/entirely managed by the Azure cloud. Customer just need to use this service, all the configuring part, provisioning the OS on virtual machines, etc this all will be managed by the Azure cloud. But before going through the industry usecases of Azure Kubernetes Service, let’s understand what actually is kubernetes technology.
What is Kubernetes ?
Kubernetes is an open source platform that automates Linux container operations. It eliminates many of the manual processes involved in deploying and scaling containerized applications. It is great automation tool used for container operations. In other words, you can cluster together groups of hosts running Linux containers, and Kubernetes helps you easily and efficiently manage those clusters. In simple words, kubernetes is the container management tool which is use for provisioning and managing the containers/pods. Using kubernetes container technology, we can deploy and scale our containerized application.
Reasons why should you use Kubernetes ?
1) Kubernetes is software that manages many server computers and runs a large number of programs across those computers. On Kubernetes, all programs run in containers so that they can be isolated from each other, and be easy to develop and deploy.
2) Kubernetes allows you to deploy cloud-native applications anywhere and manage them exactly as you like everywhere.
3) Better management through modularity.
4) Deploying and updating software at scale.
5) Laying the foundation for cloud-native apps.
6) Provide communication across a cluster.
Now, after knowing something about the kubernetes container technology, let’s see the Industry Usecases of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offered by the microsoft Azure cloud.
Industry Usecases of Azure Kubernetes service (AKS) :-
Eni SpA :-
Eni SpA, an Italian energy company, adopted Kubernetes to speed innovation and deployment of its internal business applications. After the initial setup on-premises proved successful, the company expanded to the cloud and added Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Challenge for the Eni Spa company :-
The challenge of fast infrastructure provisioning and light-speed project onboarding :-
The initial focus of Eni’s project in 2018 was to create an infrastructure where project onboarding happened fast and developers could begin work immediately. The digital transformation would include continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipelines to make all releases as easy as pushing a button. The new infrastructure had to scale horizontally, since the goal was to host a variety of applications from many different business units inside Eni, created by system integration outside of Eni.
The ICT group set up a Kubernetes infrastructure on-premises, adopting a distribution of Kubernetes by a major vendor. To avoid any special lock-in with proprietary technology, the group required the most generic Kubernetes version possible.
This setup ran successfully on-premises for six months, and the rate of internal adoption was swift. Ten business applications were migrated. Before long, the new platform was supporting several system integrators and more than 100 developers, who deployed about 300 containers.
From the start of the Kubernetes project, the ICT group knew that it wanted to take advantage of the cloud. By working with a cloud provider, Eni could test and evaluate multiple, up-to-date technologies that would otherwise imply heavy upfront investments and more time than the team had. Because a cloud provider ensures that all the underlying technologies work together, Eni’s developers would be freed for more innovative tasks. And, with a fully software-defined datacenter like Azure, Eni could support IaC and automate more processes — a primary goal of the company’s digital transformation program.
The question was which cloud provider to use. Eni wanted to find a cloud service that met its goal to avoid Kubernetes vendor lock-in. As longtime customers of Microsoft, Eni assigned a small team to explore Azure Kubernetes Service, a managed Kubernetes service that is free — customers only pay for the agent nodes within their clusters, not for the masters.
The team liked the way clusters could be created and destroyed in minutes. As a managed solution, AKS was easier to maintain than the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Kubernetes solution used on-premises. In addition, the team wanted to implement IaC using Terraform, a cloud-based provisioning tool that supports both cloud and on-premises environments. With Terraform, Eni could automate provisioning and deprovisioning of all its cloud-based resources and configurations. Plus, the Terraform command-line interface (CLI) supports AKS as a back end. For all these reasons, AKS was the clear first step on Eni’s cloud journey.
“Azure Kubernetes Service let us speed up our path to providing an enterprise-class, cloud-native environment. It let us quickly iterate over several design and technological steps, in order to deliver optimized, tailored cloud services to our internal clients.” -Roberto Previtera: senior digital architect of Eni SpA
Conclusion
Around the world, many CIO’s and technologists have chosen to use Azure Kubernetes Service(AKS), and it is expected to evolve much more in the years to come.
Containers are becoming more and more popular in the software world and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) has become the industry standard for deploying containers in production.
So that’s all for this article. Have a nice day.
