Introduction
Microsoft Azure Stack HCI provides the option to implement Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), which considerably simplifies deployment and management of Kubernetes-based orchestration of containerized workloads. Containerization offers a wide range of benefits, including increased workload density and resource usage efficiency. Azure Stack HCI further enhances the agility and resiliency inherent to Kubernetes deployments.
Scenario: Optimize operational model
Contoso Ltd. is a medium-sized financial-services company located in New York. Until recently, Contoso was operating almost entirely on-premises. Operational overhead was a significant challenge because of lack of automation and reliance on outdated technologies. Legacy hardware and software resulted in frequent stability and performance issues. These issues exposed insufficient high availability and disaster recovery provisions.
Contoso's Chief Information Officer (CIO) has asked you, the lead system engineer, to evaluate how Microsoft Azure Stack HCI can help change Contoso's IT landscape. So far, you have explored the way to implement the most common cluster and VM-level management tasks. You also investigated the methods of integrating Azure Stack HCI with Azure. Satisfied with the results, you reported your results to Contoso's CIO.
In the meantime, in its search for increased workload agility and density, Contoso IT took an interest in open-source software technologies, particularly focusing on containerization and container orchestration. As a result, a group of developers started working on transforming internally developed Windows and Linux applications into Docker-based images that can be deployed by using Helm charts. To accommodate this initiative and following another request from the Contoso's CIO, you now need to identify a way to use Azure Stack HCI to host containerized workloads.
Learning objectives
At the end of this module, you'll be able to:
- Describe the main concepts, architecture, and benefits of Kubernetes and AKS.
- Describe the benefits, characteristics, and use cases of AKS on Azure Stack HCI.
- Deploy AKS and Kubernetes clusters on Azure Stack HCI.
- Connect AKS on Azure Stack HCI to Microsoft Azure Arc for Kubernetes.
- Manage pod placement on multi-pool Kubernetes clusters running on Azure Stack HCI.
- Manage pod storage on Kubernetes clusters running on Azure Stack HCI.
- Implement containerized Windows workloads on Azure Stack HCI.
- Troubleshoot AKS and Kubernetes-related issues on Azure Stack HCI.
Prerequisites
Familiarity with:
- The key features of Windows Server
- The concept of virtualization
- The architecture, core capabilities, and primary use cases of Azure Stack HCI
- The concept of containerization and container orchestration