Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Before knowing about what is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), first we need to know what's kubernetes.

 WHAT IS KUBERNETES ?

Kubernetes is a popular open source platform for container orchestration — that is, for the management of applications built out of multiple, largely self-contained runtimes called containers.

Kubernetes is a cluster management system for managing containerized applications across multiple hosts, providing mechanisms for deployment, maintenance, and scaling of applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a fully-managed service that allows you to run Kubernetes in Azure without having to manage your own Kubernetes clusters. Azure manages all the complex parts of running Kubernetes, and you can focus on your containers 

Advantages :

• Pay only for the nodes (VMs)
• Easier cluster upgrades
• Integrated with various Azure and OSS tools and services
• Kubernetes RBAC and Azure Active Directory Integration
• Enforce rules defined in Azure Policy across multiple clusters
• Kubernetes can scale your Nodes using cluster autoscaler
• Expand your scale even greater by scheduling your containers on Azure Container Instances

Bosch Case Study On AKS! 

 What they say:

What we like about AKS is the simplified Kubernetes experience. It's click and deploy, it’s click and scale. It’s infrastructure as code too, which is quite cool for us.

     By Christian Jeschke: product owner
     Bosch

 Robert Bosch GmbH set out to solve the problem of drivers going the wrong way on highways and the goal was to save lives. Other services like this existed in Germany, but precision and speed cannot be compromised. Could Bosch get precise enough location data—in real time—to do this? The company knew it had to try.

The result is the wrong-way driver warning (WDW) service and software development kit (SDK). Designed for use by app developers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), the architecture pivots on an innovative map-matching algorithm and the scalability of Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in tandem with Azure HDInsight tools that integrate with the Apache Kafka streaming platform.

When they started their journey on Azure, they were a small team—just one or two developers. their partnership with Microsoft, the support from it's advisory teams, the great AKS documentation and enterprise expertise—it all helped them very much to succeed. 

The Bosch team had to solve two major issues: first, to get the last piece of information out of the noisy sensor data; and second, to develop a highly scalable and ultra-flexible service to process the data in near real time. The question was how to build a real-time data ingestion and processing pipeline capable of returning notifications to drivers within seconds. Bosch Technical Lead Hai Dang Le developed a proof of concept using only a small technology stack, adding, “We really went for it!”

The problem was speed. The team assumed that devices emitting location information, such as smartphone apps and automotive head units, could eventually send thousands of data points to the solution per second, from all over Europe and eventually other countries. Bosch needed lightning fast compute capable of filtering events and pushing a notification back to an end device within 10 seconds—the time estimated to make the solution viable.

The team decided to offload the work of scaling and cluster maintenance to a managed service in a public cloud with a global reach.

A team of Microsoft cloud solution architects worked closely with Bosch engineers, who provided valuable feedback to Azure product teams. Microsoft continues to work with Bosch teams around the world. Working together, they devised a solution that produced the speed Bosch needed.

The key was orchestration. By orchestrating the deployment of containers using AKS, Bosch would get repeatable, manageable clusters of containers. Bosch already had a continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) process to use in producing the container images and orchestration. The result: increased speed and reliability of deployments.

AKS also offered the simplicity of a managed Kubernetes service in the cloud. It provided the elastic provisioning that Bosch wanted, without the need to manage its own infrastructure. In addition, the developers did not have to rethink all their design decisions. Instead, they could take the core business logic developed on-premises using the open-source tools they knew and run the solution virtually as is, within a faster infrastructure with a worldwide reach. The developers can deploy self-managed AKS clusters as needed, and they get the benefit of running their services within a secured network environment.

In addition, by running their solution on Azure and AKS, the average time to calculate whether a driver is going the wrong way could be improved to approximately 60 milliseconds.

Using AKS was a strategic decision. We looked for a managed orchestrator so we could offload the work of patching, upgrading, and production-level services. That’s why we chose AKS—and it’s a very open, flexible platform

 By Hai Dang Le: technical lead

           Bosch

                An architectural overview of the Bosch wrong-way warning driver service on Azure

Conclusion:

Bosch increases vehicle safety using map-matching algorithms and Azure Kubernetes Service. Today the WDW SDK is used in smartphone offerings by many service providers, including NDrive, Radioplayer, Antenne Bayern, V-Navi, BikerSOS, and TCS. Bosch is currently in talks with several OEMs interested in embedding the solution directly in cars.