Azure Container Apps vs Azure Kubernetes Service: When to Use Each
Choose Container Apps when: You want managed infrastructure Your team lacks Kubernetes expertise You have event driven or HTTP workloads You need rapid time…
58 articles
Choose Container Apps when: You want managed infrastructure Your team lacks Kubernetes expertise You have event driven or HTTP workloads You need rapid time…
Kubernetes cost optimization is continuous. Review these metrics weekly and adjust based on actual usage patterns.
AI applications often have variable load patterns with periods of high demand followed by quiet periods. Container Apps scales to zero during idle times…
Configure autoscaling rules that balance responsiveness with cost for production deployments while maintaining service level objectives.
Understanding kubernetes ai is essential for production AI systems. Here's what you need to know.
Container Apps provides a powerful, serverless container platform. Tomorrow, I will cover Jobs in Container Apps in more detail.
Containerization and Kubernetes: Lessons Learned in 2022
Lift and shift migrations VMs in the cloud Traditional architectures Using managed services Basic automation Some containerization Microservices…
Container Apps sits between App Service and AKS: Simpler than AKS : No cluster management, no node pools More flexible than App Service : Any container, any…
Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance delivers enterprise SQL Server capabilities with cloud-native operations on any infrastructure.
Azure Arc-enabled PostgreSQL Hyperscale brings the best of Azure's managed database services to wherever your data needs to live.
Aspect Dapr Service Mesh Focus Application building blocks Network infrastructure mTLS Via mesh integration Native State Management Built in Not provided…
Open Service Mesh: Azure's SMI-Compatible Mesh
Linkerd offers simplicity and low overhead, ideal for teams wanting service mesh benefits without complexity.
Istio on AKS: Complete Service Mesh Implementation
Feature Istio Linkerd OSM mTLS Yes Yes Yes Traffic Management Advanced Basic Moderate Observability Extensive Good Good Resource Usage High Low Moderate…
eBPF programs run in a sandboxed virtual machine within the Linux kernel, processing events without kernel modifications.
eBPF (Extended Berkeley Packet Filter) allows running sandboxed programs in the Linux kernel without changing kernel source code, enabling efficient…
Calico provides enterprise grade network security for AKS with features beyond standard Kubernetes Network Policies.
Network Policies provide essential microsegmentation for Kubernetes clusters. Enable a CNI that supports policies (like Azure CNI or Calico) to enforce them.
Three built in levels: Privileged : Unrestricted (equivalent to no PSP) Baseline : Prevents known privilege escalations Restricted : Heavily restricted,…
Seccomp (Secure Computing Mode) limits which system calls a process can make, reducing the attack surface.
Inside the debug container: Ephemeral containers enable live debugging of production pods without disruption, making troubleshooting faster and safer.
containerd provides core container functionality: image management, container execution, and storage through a modular design with plugins.
Dockershim was a Kubernetes component that translated Docker API calls to the Container Runtime Interface (CRI). With its removal, containerd communicates…
Handle node failures gracefully: Configure node shutdown behavior: Control traffic routing for services: Track batch job progress: Stricter API validation:…
Dockershim removal Seccomp by default Pod security admission Ephemeral containers GA Storage capacity tracking With Dockershim removed, containerd is now…
Unlike AKS where you manage the cluster, Container Apps abstracts away the infrastructure. You focus on your containers while Azure handles scaling, load…
Prometheus remote write to Azure Monitor provides a powerful, unified metrics platform for cloud-native applications.
AKS costs come from several components: Virtual Machine nodes Storage (managed disks, Azure Files) Networking (load balancers, bandwidth) Container Registry…
AKS now supports managed identities natively, eliminating the need for service principals: The new workload identity feature provides pod level identity:
Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to run microservices and containerized applications without managing…
1. Declarative : Desired state is expressed declaratively 2. Versioned and Immutable : Git stores the canonical desired state 3. Pulled Automatically :…
Most enterprises settled on managed Kubernetes. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) became the default choice for Azure shops: Flux and ArgoCD emerged as the…
Azure Container Apps provides a sweet spot between serverless functions and full Kubernetes - the power of containers without the operational complexity of…
Arc-enabled data services bring cloud-native database capabilities to any environment. Whether you need SQL Server or PostgreSQL, you can run managed…
Arc enabled Kubernetes provides: Inventory and grouping : Organize clusters in Azure Resource Manager GitOps configurations : Deploy applications using Git…
Azure Monitor for Containers (the Container Insights feature) is the native Azure observability solution for AKS that doesn't require running your own…
Grafana is the visualisation layer that makes Prometheus metrics interpretable at a glance—and for AKS, the starting point is the community dashboards that…
Prometheus became the observability standard for Kubernetes because its data model—time-series metrics with labels—maps naturally to the dynamic…
Container Insights is the Azure Monitor feature that closes the observability gap for AKS clusters—without it, you have Kubernetes metrics available in the…
Azure AD Workload Identity is the architecture-level improvement over AAD Pod Identity that removes the NMI DaemonSet and uses Kubernetes native service…
AAD Pod Identity was the original mechanism for giving Kubernetes pods an Azure AD identity so they could access Azure resources—Key Vault secrets, Storage…
Virtual nodes in AKS enable pods to run on Azure Container Instances rather than on VM-based node pool nodes—useful for burst workloads that spike…
AKS Spot node pools are the cost reduction lever that can cut compute spend by up to 90%—at the cost of accepting that Azure may evict spot nodes with a…
Node pools are the AKS mechanism for running heterogeneous workloads on a single cluster—different VM SKUs, OS types, and node configurations within the…
AKS cluster upgrades are the operational task that feels straightforward until you do them in production and discover the nuances—node cordoning order, pod…
Helm charts provide a powerful way to package and deploy applications to AKS with Azure specific integrations. By leveraging values files for environment…
Container Insights is the built in monitoring solution for AKS: This deploys: OMS agent as DaemonSet Metrics collection Log forwarding to Log Analytics…
Azure Monitor for Prometheus addresses these while maintaining compatibility.
Many enterprises have legacy .NET Framework applications that cannot easily migrate to .NET Core. Windows containers provide a path to containerization…
AKS networking is the part of Kubernetes that looks like a detail until it becomes a blocker. "I can't reach the on-prem database from the cluster" is a…
Azure Arc is the product I've recommended most in 2021 that clients are slowest to adopt. Not because they don't need it—they do—but because "manage your…
Most enterprises I work with have Kubernetes in three places they didn't plan for: an on-prem cluster the platform team built, an EKS estate from an…
With containers becoming the standard deployment unit for modern applications, AKS provides: Managed control plane (no cluster management overhead)…
Azure Kubernetes Service: Managed Kubernetes
"How do we deploy a new version without downtime?" That's the conversation that got me writing this post. AKS gives you the primitives, but the choice…