Introduction to AKS

AKS is a super-charged Kubernetes managed service which makes creating and running a Kubernetes cluster a breeze!

This lesson explores AKS, Azure’s managed Kubernetes service, covering the fundamentals of the service and how it can be used. You’ll first learn about how as a managed service it takes care of managing and maintaining certain aspects of itself, before moving onto the core AKS concepts such as cluster design and provisioning, networking, storage management, scaling, and security. After a quick look at Azure Container Registry, the lesson then moves on to an end-to-end demonstration that shows how to provision a new AKS cluster and then deploy a sample cloud-native application into it.

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Learning Objectives

• Learn about what AKS is and how to provision, configure and maintain an AKS cluster
• Learn about AKS fundamentals and core concepts
• Learn how to work with and configure many of the key AKS cluster configuration settings
• And finally, you’ll learn how to deploy a fully working sample cloud-native application into an AKS cluster

Intended Audience

• Anyone interested in learning about AKS and its fundamentals
• Software Engineers interested in learning about how to configure and deploy workloads into an AKS cluster
• DevOps and SRE practitioners interested in understanding how to manage and maintain an AKS cluster

Prerequisites

To get the most from this lesson it would help to have a basic understanding of:

• Kubernetes (if you’re unfamiliar with Kubernetes, and/or require a refresher then please consider taking our dedicated Introduction to Kubernetes course)
• Containers, containerization, and microservice-based architectures
• Software development and the software development life cycle
• Networks and networking

Resources

If you wish to follow along with the demonstrations in part two of this lesson, you can find all of the coding assets hosted in the following three GitHub repositories:

• https://github.com/cloudacademy/aks-voteapp-demo
• https://github.com/cloudacademy/voteapp-frontend-react-2020
• https://github.com/cloudacademy/voteapp-api-go