Azure Kubernetes Service: Use-Cases

What is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?

📍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.

📍Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) may be a controlled container orchestration service, maintained by the open-source Kubernetes system, which is obtainable on the Microsoft Azure public cloud.

📍Azure Kubernetes Service provides serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance.

📍An organization can use AKS to deploy, scale, and handle Docker containers and container-based applications across a cluster of container hosts

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Benefits:

𝙰𝚣𝚞𝚛𝚎 𝙺𝚞𝚋𝚎𝚛𝚗𝚎𝚝𝚎𝚜 𝚂𝚎𝚛𝚟𝚒𝚌𝚎 𝚒𝚜 𝚌𝚞𝚛𝚛𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚕𝚢 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚙𝚎𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚋𝚘𝚝𝚑 𝙰𝚖𝚊𝚣𝚘𝚗 𝙴𝚕𝚊𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚌 𝙺𝚞𝚋𝚎𝚛𝚗𝚎𝚝𝚎𝚜 𝚂𝚎𝚛𝚟𝚒𝚌𝚎 (𝙴𝙺𝚂) 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝙶𝚘𝚘𝚐𝚕𝚎 𝙺𝚞𝚋𝚎𝚛𝚗𝚎𝚝𝚎𝚜 𝙴𝚗𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚎 (𝙶𝙺𝙴). 𝙸𝚝 𝚘𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝚗𝚞𝚖𝚎𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚜 𝚏𝚎𝚊𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚎𝚜 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝚌𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐, 𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚊𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚐, 𝚜𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚖𝚘𝚗𝚒𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝙰𝚣𝚞𝚛𝚎 𝙺𝚞𝚋𝚎𝚛𝚗𝚎𝚝𝚎𝚜 /𝙲𝚕𝚞𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚜, 𝚠𝚑𝚒𝚌𝚑 𝚒𝚜 𝚊𝚝𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚞𝚜𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝙼𝚒𝚌𝚛𝚘𝚜𝚘𝚏𝚝 𝙰𝚣𝚞𝚛𝚎. 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚞𝚋𝚜𝚎𝚚𝚞𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚋𝚎𝚗𝚎𝚏𝚒𝚝𝚜 𝚘𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝙰𝙺𝚂:

📍Efficient resource utilization: The fully managed AKS offers easy deployment and management of containerized applications with efficient resource utilization that elastically provisions additional resources without the headache of managing the Kubernetes infrastructure.

📍Faster application development: Developers spent most of the time on bug-fixing. AKS reduces the debugging time while handling patching, auto-upgrades, and self-healing and simplifies the container orchestration. It definitely saves tons of your time and developers will specialize in developing their apps while remaining more productive.

📍Security and compliance: Cybersecurity is one of the foremost important aspects of recent applications and businesses. AKS integrates with Azure Active Directory (AD) and offers on-demand access to the users to greatly reduce threats and risks. AKS is additionally completely compliant with the standards and regulatory requirements like System and Organization Controls (SOC), HIPAA, ISO, and PCI DSS.

📍Quicker development and integration: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) supports auto-upgrades, monitoring, and scaling and helps in minimizing the infrastructure maintenance that results in comparatively faster development and integration. It also supports provisioning additional computing resources in Serverless Kubernetes within seconds without fear about managing the Kubernetes infrastructure.

Azure Kubernetes Service Features:

📍Microsoft Azure offers Azure Kubernetes Service that simplifies managed Kubernetes cluster deployment in the public cloud environment and also manages the health and monitoring of managed Kubernetes service. Customers can create AKS clusters using the Azure portal or Azure CLI and can manage the agent nodes.

1. Open-source environment with enterprise commitment

Microsoft has inducted several employees in the last couple of years to make Kubernetes easier for the businesses and developers to use and participate in open-source projects and became the third giant contributor to make Kubernetes more business-oriented, cloud-native, and accessible by bringing the best practices and advanced learning with diverse customers and users to the Kubernetes community.

2.Nodes and clusters

In AKS, apps, and support, services are run on Kubernetes nodes and the AKS cluster is a combination of one or more than one node. And, these AKS nodes are run on Azure Virtual Machines. Nodes that are configured with the same configuration are grouped called node pools. Nodes in the Kubernetes cluster are scaled-up and scaled-down according to the resources are required in the cluster. So, nodes, clusters, and node pools are the most prominent components of your Azure Kubernetes environment.

3.Role-based access control (RBAC)

AKS easily integrates with Azure Active Directory (AD) to provide role-based access, security, and monitoring of Kubernetes architecture based on identity and group membership. You can also monitor the performance of your AKS and the apps.

4.Integration of development tools

Another important feature of AKS is the development tools such as Helm and Draft are seamlessly integrated with AKS where Azure Dev Spaces can provide a quicker and iterative Kubernetes development experience to the developers. Containers can be run and debugged directly in the Azure Kubernetes environment with less stress on the configuration

5.Removes complexities

AKS removes your implementation, installation, maintenance, and security complexities in Azure cloud architecture. It also reduces substantial costs where no per-cluster charges are being imposed on you

𝙲𝚊𝚜𝚎 𝚂𝚝𝚞𝚍𝚢

𝔹𝕠𝕤𝕔𝕙 𝕚𝕟𝕔𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕖𝕤 𝕧𝕖𝕙𝕚𝕔𝕝𝕖 𝕤𝕒𝕗𝕖𝕥𝕪 𝕦𝕤𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕞𝕒𝕡-𝕞𝕒𝕥𝕔𝕙𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕒𝕝𝕘𝕠𝕣𝕚𝕥𝕙𝕞𝕤 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝔸𝕫𝕦𝕣𝕖 𝕂𝕦𝕓𝕖𝕣𝕟𝕖𝕥𝕖𝕤 𝕊𝕖𝕣𝕧𝕚𝕔𝕖

Technical Story

“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.”

📍The result is the wrong-way driver warning (WDW) service and software development kit (SDK). Designed for use by app developers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), the architecture pivots on an innovative map-matching algorithm and the scalability of Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in tandem with Azure HDInsight tools that integrate with the Apache Kafka streaming platform.

The right way to solve the wrong-way problem

📍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.

📍When the product team brainstormed the idea to solve the problem of wrong-way driving, they did not know whether it was technically possible. For such a service to work commercially, it had to locate vehicles in real-time with pinpoint precision.

📍“We were looking for a cloud option where we could run our core business logic with zero changes on top of a new infrastructure,”

📍Also, 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.

📍The team was also interested in exploring other Azure services, such as solutions for managing APIs and security. “We didn’t want to have to handle security from the outside, like a web application firewall or something like that. With Azure, we get that,” Rode says.

How does the solution work?

📍The wrong-way driver warning solution runs as a service on Azure and provides an SDK. Service providers, such as smartphone app developers and OEM partners, can install the WDW SDK to make use of the service within their products.

📍The SDK maintains a list of hotspots within which GPS data is collected anonymously. These hotspots include specific locations, such as segments of divided highways and on-ramps. Every time a driver enters a hotspot, the client generates a new ID, so the service remains anonymous.

Today the solution ingests approximately 6 million requests per day from devices emitting GPS data or from a partner’s back-end system. Anyone can download the SDK and try it out. The APIs grant a free request quota for test accounts. For production use, service providers request permission and then use the WDW SDK to register themselves for their own API authentication keys via the Azure API Management developer portal. Within their application, they configure the service’s endpoints by authenticating with their key for ingress and push notifications. The WDW service on Azure does the rest.

📍When a driver using a WDW-configured app or in-car system enters a hotspot, the WDW SDK begins to collect GPS signals and sensor events, such as acceleration and rotational data and heading information.

📍These data points are packaged as observations and sent in the frequency of 1 Hertz (Hz) — one event per second — via HTTP to the WDW service on Azure, either directly or to the service provider’s back end, and then to Azure. The SDK supports both routes so that service providers stay in charge of the data that is sent to the WDW system.

📍If the WDW service determines that the driver is going the wrong way within a hotspot, it sends a notification to the originating device and to other drivers in the vicinity who are also running an app with the WDW SDK.

An architecture for wrong-way driving

📍The point of ingress for the WDW service is Azure API Management, which works in combination with Azure App Gateway, a managed global load-balancing service that can perform Layer-7 routing and SSL termination. The gateway decouples clients from services and acts as a reverse proxy, routing requests from clients to services.

📍Bosch uses API Management to send observations to an ingress engine (sendObservationAPI) and to send push notifications to client devices (sendPushAPI). “We use API Management like the entry door,” says Le. “It handles quota management, authentication of customers, and also terminates HTTPS for us.” To connect the microservices inside the cluster with API Management, the WDW service uses Traefik, an open-source reverse proxy that acts as an ingress controller to ensure load balancing and dynamic discovery of the internal services by the Kubernetes API.

For years, Bosch developers had been using the Docker platform to containerize their code. For the first time, however, the WDW team hosted the Docker images in Azure Container Registry. “It was easy, safe, and secured to the outside,” notes Le. Azure Container Registry is compatible with the open-source Docker Registry v2, so the developers could use the same Docker CLI tools they already knew.

Within the first AKS cluster, the following apps process the streaming data:

• The ingest app receives the data from the gateway and stores it in MongoDB.
• The detector app does the heavy lifting by matching the location data on a map and then making the initial decision about whether the trip is suspicious.
• The alert validator app is a post-validation component used to verify the differing road characteristics of various countries.
• The data pump is solely tasked to persist data asynchronously.
• The push registry app handles egress — the broadcast of the push notifications to the service providers. The WDW service supports Android, Google, and Apple push notifications and offers an option that service providers can use to configure custom alerts.

“We really enjoyed having Azure on our side because we could just spin up the service and route. We can deploy the service worldwide.”

-𝙲𝚑𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚊𝚗 𝙹𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚑𝚔𝚎: 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚍𝚞𝚌𝚝 𝚘𝚠𝚗𝚎𝚛 𝙱𝚘𝚜𝚌𝚑

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