The course is part of these learning paths
See 1 moreThis course is focused on how to get a Kubernetes cluster up and running on Azure. It does not cover all of the details of how Kubernetes works because it’s not necessary to know all of those details to configure a basic Kubernetes cluster.
The course starts with a brief overview of what Kubernetes does and what a Kubernetes cluster looks like. After that, you’ll see a demo of how to create a cluster using AKS. Finally, you’ll see how to manage a cluster using the kubectl command.
Learning Objectives
- Create and configure an Azure Kubernetes Service cluster
Intended Audience
- Anyone who would like to learn the basics of using Azure Kubernetes Service
Prerequisites
- General IT knowledge
- Linux experience (recommended)
- A Microsoft Azure account is recommended if you want to do the demos yourself (sign up for a free trial at https://azure.microsoft.com/free if you don’t have an account)
Resources
The GitHub repository for this course is at https://github.com/cloudacademy/configuring-aks.
As you probably know, containers are becoming the preferred way to build, test, and deploy applications. A container typically includes an application plus all of the third-party packages it needs. Containers are somewhat like virtual machines except they don’t include the operating system. This makes it easy to deploy them because they’re very lightweight compared to virtual machines. In fact, containers run on virtual machines.
If your entire application is in a single container, then it’s very easy to run it on Azure. But running a single instance of a container is usually not sufficient. Most production applications need to be both scalable and highly available, so you need to run multiple copies of your container on multiple virtual machines.
Furthermore, it’s becoming a common practice to break an application up into multiple microservices that run in separate containers. When you combine this with the need for high availability and scalability, the number of containers you need to manage can be overwhelming.
The solution is to use a container orchestrator that takes care of the underlying technical details for you. By far the most popular orchestrator is Kubernetes, which is an open-source solution.
Kubernetes lets you create clusters of virtual machines that run containers. Each virtual machine is called a node, and each node runs one or more pods. Each pod typically contains one container. The cluster also contains a control plane, which manages the nodes and pods.
This is a very basic overview. Kubernetes has all kinds of features that help with storage, networking, security, and management. Despite the fact that Kubernetes is designed to simplify container deployments, it is quite a complex system, so it can take a bit of work to get it installed and running on a new cluster.
Fortunately, Microsoft has made it much easier to do this by using Azure Kubernetes Service, or AKS for short. With AKS, you can create and configure a Kubernetes cluster quite easily. I’ll show you how in the next video.
Guy launched his first training website in 1995 and he's been helping people learn IT technologies ever since. He has been a sysadmin, instructor, sales engineer, IT manager, and entrepreneur. In his most recent venture, he founded and led a cloud-based training infrastructure company that provided virtual labs for some of the largest software vendors in the world. Guy’s passion is making complex technology easy to understand. His activities outside of work have included riding an elephant and skydiving (although not at the same time).