Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Made Easy: Updated Dec 2023

In today’s fast-paced and dynamic business environment, containerization and orchestration are becoming increasingly important. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration and management, providing organizations with the flexibility and scalability needed to manage modern applications.

Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service that eliminates the complexity of managing and scaling your Kubernetes infrastructure, enabling you to focus on building and deploying your applications. AKS offers benefits such as seamless integration with other Azure services, rapid deployment and scaling, automatic upgrades, built-in security and compliance, and much more.

This course is meant to make AKS easy to learn, understand, and to provide students with a comprehensive and practical experience with AKS.

The course start with an introduction about containers and Kubernetes, then we will cover topics such as creating and managing Kubernetes clusters, understand the components at Kubernetes and Azure level, configuring networking with respect to network plugins, Kubernetes services, SNAT, outbound types and types of AKS clusters in relation to control plane access, like public or private AKS clusters and the ones with VNET integration.

Security will be the next topics and we will start with a section about AKS-managed Active Directory integration, then we will look gain knowledge of identities, certificates, network policies, how to use secrets from the Azure Key Vault, about Azure policy, Microsoft Defender, AppArmor, and SecComp.

Scaling is important, so we will discover resource reservations, Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), Vertical Pod Autoscaler, Cluster Autoscaler (CAS), Virtual Nodes add-on, and KEDA.

The next section will be Storage, and you will learn how to use Azure Disk, including snapshot, resize, Azure File, and Azure Blob in AKS.

Then, we will discover the monitoring and troubleshooting chapter, where we will learn default available features as well as enabling Container Insights or managed Prometheus and Grafana.

Subsequent to this, we will learn about upgrades and related features like auto-upgrade or planned maintenance, then how to integrate our AKS cluster with the Azure Container Registry.

After this, we will focus on ingress controllers, like application gateway ingress controllers (AGIC) and nginx ingress controllers, and how to expose an application via HTTPS or how to use Let’s Encrypt and Cert Manager.

Finally, we will focus on high availability, and you will learn about available tiers, availability zones, and how to obtain reliability while routing traffic between multiple AKS clusters.

By the end of this course, you will be equipped with the skills and knowledge to effectively deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters in AKS, and to leverage the benefits of AKS in the industry, including faster application development, improved scalability, and increased flexibility.