Use-cases solved by Azure Kubernetes Service

• What is Azure Kubernetes Service?

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a service that offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience and enterprise-grade security and governance. We can unite our development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver and scale applications .

Organizations that use Azure Kubernetes service to solve their industrial use cases:-

Siemens Healthineers

Siemens Healthineers is leading the digitalization of healthcare with its Digital Ecosystem, which helps health providers and solution developers bring more value to the delivery of care, ultimately improving the quality of insights derived from healthcare data. Siemens Healthineers uses Microsoft Azure to make solutions more accessible, and it uses Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and other tools for a fast, efficient, and competitive development pipeline.

Siemens Healthineers has taken a containerized approach to application development, which means it uses virtualization at the application operating system level as opposed to launching virtual machines. The company deploys its distributed applications in Docker containers, orchestrates those containers using Kubernetes, and monitors and manages the environment with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Siemens Healthineers chose AKS because developers can quickly and easily work with their applications with minimal operations and maintenance overhead — provisioning, upgrading, and scaling resources without taking applications offline. With AKS, Siemens Healthineers can comfortably scale out its Kubernetes environment and scale back again if it doesn’t need the compute power, creating very high-density deployments on a microservices level.

“Using Azure Kubernetes Service puts us into a position to not only deploy our business logic in Docker containers, including the orchestration, but also … to easily manage the exposure and control and meter the access” -Thomas Gossler : Lead Architect, Digital Ecosystem Platform, Siemens Healthineers

Bosch

Bosch invests heavily in research and development (R&D), staffing more than 70,000 employees in R&D alone. These R&D staffers, along with 27,000 software and IT experts and 1,000 AI specialists, help maintain its position as Europe’s top provider of automotive solutions.

“When we started our journey on Azure, we were a really small team — just one or two developers. Our partnership with Microsoft, the support from their advisory teams, the great AKS documentation and enterprise expertise — it all helped us very much to succeed.”- Bernhard Rode: software engineer, Bosch

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. Thanks to the trusted partnership Bosch had with Microsoft, Azure Kubernetes Service was the obvious choice. 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.

So this was all about how Azure Kubernetes Service solved the problems of Siemens Healthineers and Bosch.