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Microsoft Azure Gets The Managed Kubernetes Service

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Microsoft has announced the availability of managed Kubernetes service for Azure customers. This brand-new service dubbed as Azure Container Service (AKS), makes it extremely easy to provision a Kubernetes cluster in the public cloud running the latest version of the open source orchestration engine.

Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestration engine for managing containerized workloads in production. Prior to the launch of AKS, Azure customers could still run Kubernetes in Azure. But that involved managing and maintaining the cluster infrastructure with very little intervention from Microsoft. AKS takes the pain out of running Kubernetes cluster in the cloud by making it easy to maintain and upgrade the infrastructure. Microsoft is committed to bringing the most recent version of Kubernetes to AKS. With the Kubernetes community shipping a new version almost every quarter, customers will be able to exploit the new features by moving to the latest version.

To appreciate the real value of managed Kubernetes offerings such as AKS, we need to understand the high-level architecture of Kubernetes.

Every Kubernetes cluster has two set of servers – master and nodes. The master servers run the management layer of the cluster that is responsible for ensuring the availability of applications. Each time an application is deployed or scaled, the request first goes to one of the master servers, which will perform the operation. The master servers expose the API utilized by the tools that deal with application deployment.

The nodes are the real workhorses of Kubernetes cluster. They are responsible for running the actual workloads. But unlike master servers, the nodes can come and go. When something goes wrong with the nodes, they can be very quickly replaced. To expand the capacity of the cluster, additional nodes can be added on the fly. The master servers ensure that the nodes and the applications running on the nodes are healthy and available all the time.

When administrators deploy a Kubernetes cluster, they configure and deploy a set of master servers and nodes. They have to constantly monitor the master servers to ensure the smooth running of the cluster. When new versions of Kubernetes become available, they will have to perform an upgrade operation involving setting up a parallel infrastructure running the latest version, and gracefully migrating the applications to the new cluster. The management, maintenance, and upgradation of Kubernetes clusters put a lot of pressure on the operations teams.

Enter AKS, and the operations team will have nothing to manage except the workloads. Microsoft takes ownership of the master servers by running it in a hidden control plane. Administrators will only have to provision a managed cluster and deploy applications. Performing upgrades is as easy as running a couple of commands. The managed infrastructure will perform all the steps to gracefully migrate the applications from the older version of the Kubernetes cluster to the latest version with minimal downtime.

With AKS, Microsoft is targeting Google, the company that incubated Kubernetes before handing it over to the CNCF. Google Container Engine (GKE) is one of the first managed Kubernetes offerings in the public cloud. Unlike Microsoft, Google charges a flat fee of $0.15 for managing the GKE cluster with six nodes or more, which translates to a monthly price of $110, which Microsoft is waving off with AKS.

Source: Google

Source: Microsoft

The best thing about using AKS is that it is free. Customers are expected to pay only for the compute time consumed by the VMs running the nodes. Microsoft doesn’t charge for the VMs running the master servers, and the cluster management is always free. Effectively, customers will pay only for the compute, storage, and network resources associated with the nodes. During the technical preview, AKS is available only in US West 2 region.

 

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