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Elastic demand handling with AKS

API Management
Azure Cosmos DB
Functions
Kubernetes Service
Traffic Manager

Solution ideas

This article is a solution idea. If you'd like us to expand the content with more information, such as potential use cases, alternative services, implementation considerations, or pricing guidance, let us know by providing GitHub feedback.

This example shows how to achieve fast and reliable service quality during seasonal and other high-traffic demand periods.

Potential use cases

This approach can be used to manage the following scenarios:

  • Elastic scaling handles traffic and sales bursts without managing infrastructures.
  • Low-latency data access is from anywhere in the world for fast, robust user experiences.
  • High availability is achieved across multiple data centers.

Architecture

Architecture diagram of AKS demand spikes.

Download a Visio file of this architecture.

Dataflow

The data flows through the solution as follows:

  1. Azure Traffic Manager routes incoming requests to Azure API management Gateway.
  2. API Gateway ensures requests meet security and other policies, and then routes them to service running in Azure Kubernetes Service.
  3. Services uses Azure Cosmos DB, Azure CDN, and Azure Functions to achieve low-latency data access data as needed from anywhere in the world.
  4. When demand spikes past current capacity, AKS uses virtual nodes to dynamically scale up the service.

Components

This scenario is implemented several Azure components:

  • Azure Kubernetes Service: The fully managed Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) makes deploying and managing containerized applications easy
  • Azure API Management: Selectively expose data and services to the outside world and manage incoming API calls
  • Azure Cosmos DB: A fully managed database service with turnkey global distribution and transparent multi-primary replication.
  • Azure Functions: An event-driven serverless compute platform that can also solve complex orchestration problems.
  • Azure Storage: Azure Storage offers a durable, highly available, and massively scalable cloud storage solution and includes object, file, disk, queue, and table storage.
  • Azure Traffic Manager: A DNS-based traffic load balancer for distributing traffic optimally to services across global Azure regions
  • Azure CDN: A global CDN solution for delivering high-bandwidth content.
  • Azure Notification Hub: Send push notifications to any platform from any back end.

Contributors

This article is maintained by Microsoft. It was originally written by the following contributors.

Principal author:

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