What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes (also known as k8s or “kube”) is an open source container orchestration platform that automates many of the manual processes involved in deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications.
Why use Kubernetes?
Keeping containerized apps up and running can be complex because they often involve many containers deployed across different machines.
Kubernetes provides a way to schedule and deploy those containers — plus scale them to your desired state and manage their lifecycles. Use Kubernetes to implement your container-based applications in a portable, scalable and extensible way.
Introduction to Azure Kubernetes Service
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) simplifies deploying a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure by offloading much of the complexity and operational overhead to Azure
- As a hosted Kubernetes service, Azure handles critical tasks for us, like health monitoring and maintenance.
- Since the Kubernetes masters are managed by Azure, we only manage and maintain the agent nodes. Thus, as a managed Kubernetes service, AKS is free; we only pay for the agent nodes within your clusters, not for the masters.
- We can create an AKS cluster using the Azure portal, the Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, or using template-driven deployment options, such as Resource Manager templates and Terraform.
- When we deploy an AKS cluster, the Kubernetes master and all nodes are deployed and configured for us. Additional features such as advanced networking, Azure Active Directory integration, and monitoring can also be configured during the deployment process. Windows Server containers are supported in AKS.
How Siemens Healthineers using Azure Kubernetes Service ?
Using Azure Kubernetes Service puts us into a position to not only deploy our business logic in Docker containers, including the orchestration, but also … to easily manage the exposure and control and meter the access.
Thomas Gossler: Lead Architect, Digital Ecosystem Platform
Siemens Healthineers
- The company deploys its distributed applications in Docker containers, orchestrates those containers using Kubernetes, and monitors and manages the environment with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
- Siemens Healthineers chose AKS because developers can quickly and easily work with their applications with minimal operations and maintenance overhead — provisioning, upgrading, and scaling resources without taking applications offline.
- With AKS, Siemens Healthineers can comfortably scale out its Kubernetes environment and scale back again if it doesn’t need the compute power, creating very high-density deployments on a microservices level.
- Managing a stable runtime environment with AKS helps Siemens Healthineers realize shorter release cycles and achieve its desired continuous delivery approach.
- And when rolling out new software, the company appreciates that it doesn’t have to worry about breaking its production environment, due to AKS upgrade and failure domains — new releases get deployed smoothly to customers with zero downtime.
“Prior mechanisms for connecting to devices in the field through remote desktop were slow and complex,” says Gossler. “But we’re hoping that with Azure IoT solution accelerators and serverless capabilities like edge computing, we can run functionality on edge devices in the field to simplify our data gathering and analysis — anonymizing data when necessary — and our operation of remote assistance workflows. This is an enabler for important analytic scenarios in the healthcare space.”
I think our Digital Ecosystem, and the technological advances we are making through our relationship with Microsoft, can prompt a big step forward in digitalization for the whole industry.
Carsten Spies: Head of Research and Development, Digital Ecosystem Platform