Some great updates to AKS to support availability zones in Azure, which allows you to target specific datacenters within a region to run one or more instances of your application to give you higher uptime within that region. check out this video to learn more.
The integration of AKS into the rest of Azure continues…this time with Azure Policy. Learn more about it here: https://youtu.be/QG1hOasct0M
Azure released 1.13 to Azure Kubernetes Service last week! This also means that if you are running 1.9 – you have 30 days to upgrade to a newer version. Learn more here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-kubernetes-service-kubernetes-1-9-end-of-life-notice/. Learn more about AKS support for 1.13 here: https://github.com/Azure/AKS/releases.
We recommend using official images from Docker Hub. These images have been curated to provide the key languages, runtimes, best practices and security updates. Considering your image will be copied to the container registry and downloaded numerous times through the deployment pipeline, it is important to keep your image sizes small. In general, you want […]
If you want to easily setup a continuous Integration pipeline into Azure, this is the thing for you. In a few clicks, you can pick a language and target environment and Azure will setup all the integration. If nothing else, it works great for quickly setting up a demo environment! https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/features/devops-projects/
Here is a simple sample app that you can deploy azure kubernetes service: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/tutorial-kubernetes-prepare-app
Trend Micro just introduced a set of security tools for Kubernetes and integrates with Azure, Google and AWS. It’s designed to scan images during your DevOps pipeline and more. Check it out here: https://containerjournal.com/2019/04/15/trend-micro-advances-devsecops-via-kubernetes-integration/amp/
We’ve assembled a collection of best practices for various topics related to AKS – from storage to external access – you can learn about it here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/best-practices.
Well…I’m familiar with container registries but there is a new paradigm that is being worked on… an artifact registry. The idea is the same as a container (image) registry…store versions of files/configs/images, etc and distribute it to your containers. This would create a new standard that would be supported across all docker implementations and would […]
I was able to get https working to my AKS cluster by using the Azure Front Door service. It allowed me to map my custom domain and secure it with SSL without having to manage certificates or anything like that!
Sometimes the best way to learn about a product is to understand its gaps and the feedback page for AKS will give you insight on what people are asking for that isn’t there today. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/914020-azure-kubernetes-service-aks
I’ve been collecting the various resources I’ve been using to teach containers/Kubernetes in one place and wanted to share it out. Right now, it includes presentations and a sample website that you can containerize. Check it out here.
Here are some commands that I put together to give you a walkthrough of using docker to create a container image and publish it to Docker Hub. #kubectl cheat sheet: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/cheatsheet #docker cheat sheet: https://devhints.io/docker #Tutorials: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/ #Contents of the Dockerfile### #FROM nginx #COPY static-html-directory /usr/share/nginx/html docker build -t mydemoimage1 . docker images #make sure […]
You can follow the latest updates on AKS and find out about upcoming features here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/
Here is a good video recapping the capabilities of virtual nodes using Azure Container Instances and Azure Dev Spaces.
If you are trying to decide which Azure service to use to build your app, take a look at this decision tree. If you end up heading down the path of containers, then this might help you understand which service is right for you.
There is a good article that talks about persistent storage options for AKS. You basically have 3 choices in Azure: Standard Managed Disk Premium Managed Disk Azure Files If you only need one container to access the volume at a time, then you can leverage standard or premium disks based on your needs. However, if […]
We just introduced the ability to get alerts from the portal for service events. Check it out.
There are times when you want to deploy your PaaS resources on a private network instead of leveraging the public endpoint. Azure has a bunch of services that support service endpoints – a feature that lets you access a SQL/MySQL/Cosmos database on a vnet. Azure Container Registry has a preview feature that will let you […]
This is a great weekly video series on new developer technologies at Microsoft.
There a number of considerations in building a microservice-based application in Azure. This article walks through some key points like design, scalability, availability security and deployment considerations: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/reference-architectures/microservices/aks
I decided to improve the visibility that Kubernetes has into my node.js backend by implementing liveness probes. As we discussed previously, Kubernetes has two different types of health checks: Readiness probe – makes sure the container is ready to respond to user requests and participate in the load balancer. If it fails, it is removed. […]
When you package up your application in a container image, you need somewhere to store it. That is the purpose of the container registry. It is like an app store for your container images. A registry is organized into repositories, where a repository holds all the versions of a specific image. You might have separate […]
Just heard that there is a preview feature that lets you control failover of your RA-GRS storage account. From the docs.microsoft.com article: Azure Storage supports account failover (preview) for geo-redundant storage accounts. With account failover, you can initiate the failover process for your storage account if the primary endpoint becomes unavailable. The failover updates the […]
Here is a great video I found that gives an overview of how to best utilize, secure and manage your Kubernetes cluster.
A common question with AKS is: “how many clusters do I need?” There are two patterns to consider: Physical Isolation With this pattern, you use different clusters based on environment like dev, test, staging and production. Or you can break out the clusters by team or project. In this manner, you are “sandboxing” the applications […]
Here is my highlevel framework for working with customers to migrate their application to Azure. It is work in progress, but I wanted to get version 1.0 out there so 2.0 can happen one day! Before we begin, here is our fictitious three-tiered app: UI – ASP.NET Web Forms, stateful API – .NET, java, monolith […]
I’m learning about how to deal with storage for your containers. There are a few options: emptyDir – is scoped to the Pod and lifespan of the Pod. It seems to take local storage from the host and presents it to the pod. For example, if you had two containers running in a pod, they […]
Brendan Burns, co-founder of Kubernetes and Distinguished Engineer in Azure, put together a series of whiteboard sessions on Kubernetes and he does a great job explaining the basic concepts. You can check out my playlist of Kuberenetes videos here.
Kubernetes has a few health checks that it performs to ensure your containers are healthy and running: Liveness Probe – makes sure the application is running properly. This is done by the developers exposing a health check API that you tell Kubernetes to check on a periodic basis. If it fails, Kubernetes will restart the […]
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