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Today, most companies have a varied application portfolio. A mix of legacy virtualized applications combined with cloud native developments. To extract the maximum value of a platform such as Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure, unleashing full application value, we need to leverage Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This way, developers get a consistent experience with the hyperscale optimized and fully managed Azure Kubernetes services.
There are two ways to create AKS clusters:
When deployed, you can choose default control plane nodes and Kubernetes cluster configuration options. Other advanced settings (monitoring, Microsoft Entra ID, and others) can be configured during and after the deployment process.
When AKS is deployed, you can connect your Kubernetes clusters to Azure. Once connected to Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes, you can access your on-premises Kubernetes clusters through the Azure portal and deploy management services such as GitOps, Microsoft Defender for Kubernetes, Azure Monitor Container Insights, and Azure Policy for Kubernetes.
Once connected to Azure Arc, you can use Azure Monitor for:
AKS can host Linux and Windows-based containers. Upon Kubernetes cluster creation on top of the Azure Stack HCI infrastructure, we can choose to create node pools to run Linux, Windows, or both type of containers.
As a hosted Kubernetes service, AKS handles critical day-to-day management, such as upgrades and automatic certificate rotations, so you can focus on running and developing containerized workloads.
Figure 55. AKS hybrid architecture with Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure
The management cluster, also known as the service host, gets deployed as a single Linux-based VM running the Azure Linux distribution. The management cluster is responsible for deploying and managing multiple workload clusters and it includes the following components:
Then we can create workload clusters. This creates the highly available control plane components and worker node components all in the form of Windows or Linux-based VMs depending on what kind of containers you intend to build. Containerized applications run on a workload cluster. To achieve application isolation, you can deploy up to eight workload clusters. The workload cluster consists of the following components:
Figure 56. Default AKS hybrid components
For more details on the Kubernetes clusters architecture and components, visit this Microsoft page.