What is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)? Azure Kubernetes Service is a managed container orchestration service based on the open source Kubernetes system, which is available on the Microsoft Azure public cloud. An organization can use AKS to handle critical functionality such as deploying, scaling and managing Docker containers and container-based applications.
Kubernetes is the de-facto open source platform for container orchestration but typically requires a lot of overhead in cluster management. AKS helps manage much of the overhead involved, reducing the complexity of deployment and management tasks. AKS is designed for organizations that want to build scalable applications with Docker and Kubernetes while using the Azure architecture.
AKS features and benefits The primary benefits of AKS are flexibility, automation and reduced management overhead for administrators and developers. For example, AKS automatically configures all of the Kubernetes nodes that control and manage the worker nodes during the deployment process and handles a range of other tasks, including Azure Active Directory (AD) integration, connections to monitoring services and configuration of advanced networking features such as HTTP application routing. Users can monitor a cluster directly or view all clusters with Azure Monitor. Because AKS is a managed service, Microsoft handles all Kubernetes upgrades for the service as new versions become available. Users can decide whether and when to upgrade the Kubernetes version in their own AKS cluster to reduce the possibility of accidental workload