Getting started with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Kubernetes allows you to build your applications with your preferred programming language, OS, libraries, or messaging bus. Existing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools can integrate with Kubernetes to schedule and deploy releases.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) provides a managed Kubernetes service that reduces the complexity for deployment and core management tasks, including coordinating upgrades. The AKS control plane is managed by the Azure platform, and you only pay for the AKS nodes that run your applications

Kubernetes cluster architecture

A Kubernetes cluster is divided into two components:

· Control plane nodes provide the core Kubernetes services and orchestration of application workloads.

· Nodes run your application workloads.

You can create AKS using Azure portal or CLI tools. Azure portal option is beginner friendly. First you can go into azure portal and select containers. Then select Kubernetes Service.

Then it will direct into Create Kubernetes Cluster window. In that you can select new resource group and give cluster name. Also you can select preferred Kubernetes version. Afterward you can select Review+ create to build AKS.

Azure also supports creating AKS using CLI. For that you can use following commands.

az group create –name myResourceGroup –location eastus

az aks create --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster

 --node-count 1 --enable-addons monitoring --generate-ssh-keys

Once AKS created you can view using portal or commands line.

Since Azure manage things like networking, scaling, monitoring we can only focus on deploying applications.

Auto Scaling

Monitoring

Once application deployed it can be viewed using command line or dashboard. Next tutorial we will discuss deploying application to Kubernetes cluster. You can launch AKS dashboard using following command.

az aks browse –resource-group myResourceGroup –name myAKSCluster

After application deployment you can go to services in look for public IP address to launch web site.