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.
I hope you enjoyed learning about Azure Kubernetes Service. Let’s do a quick review of what you learned.
Containers are somewhat like virtual machines except they don’t include the operating system. The easiest way to run an application that includes many containers is to use a container orchestrator. The most popular orchestrator is Kubernetes.
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. Azure Kubernetes Service makes it easy to create a Kubernetes cluster on Azure.
If you only need a cluster for testing or development purposes, then one node is usually sufficient, but if you’re going to run it in production, then you should have at least three nodes.
All three nodes will be the same type of VM. If you need something different for one of your applications, then you can create a separate node pool with different nodes.
To allow a cluster to access other Azure resources, you need to assign an identity to it. The best way to do this is to use a managed identity rather than a service principal.
To authorize users to perform specific tasks on the cluster, you should enable role-based access control.
It can be useful to integrate an AKS cluster with Azure Container Registry, Azure Monitor, and Azure Policy. At the very least, you should enable integration with Azure Monitor.
Once a cluster is running, you can manage it with the kubectl command. Before you can use the kubectl command, you need to get credentials for it using the “az aks get-credentials” command.
To see the nodes that are running in your cluster, use the “kubectl get nodes” command. To deploy an application to a cluster, first, you need to create a Kubernetes manifest file. This file includes details of the containers to use as well as the Kubernetes services to create to give access to the apps running in the containers. Then you can deploy the application using the “kubectl apply” command.
To learn more about Kubernetes and AKS, you can take another one of our courses or labs, or you can read Microsoft’s documentation at this URL.
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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).