Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Reviews

I work for cloud transformation with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for major UI transformations of products and services.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) operates on a pay-as-you-go model, so my company can get whatever we require from the tool.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is not up to optimal standards when it comes to capturing logs and visualization. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the product.

I have experience with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for two years. My role in the company is to manage all the architects and resources. I am an implementer who develops applications and deploys them.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a five out of ten.

My clients who use the product are mostly medium-sized businesses.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I rate the initial setup phase of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) as a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The solution can be deployed in thirty to forty minutes. After the tool's process was streamlined in our company, it could be deployed in only five to ten minutes.

The product is expensive.

The product supports our company's container orchestration needs since we mainly use it for management and deployment purposes while also covering areas like orchestration and auto-scaling.

The product serves the purpose of helping streamline our company's application deployment and scaling processes.

Speaking about the feature of the product that has been most impactful in managing our Kubernetes-based environment, I would say that I am not into the deployment part of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) since I have to focus more on strategy implementation.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is only one of the services that I have used, and it is a big application. The tool has a lot of UI built on Angular, which is then converted as a microservice and clubbed with Java Spring Boot before deploying it on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

The product offers security and access management features, but there are some areas, like encryption, where some improvements can be made. I rate the product an eight out of ten for security and access management features.

The product's integration with the existing CI/CD pipelines is good. I rate the tool's integration with the existing CI/CD pipelines an eight out of ten.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

I found the Helm deployment feature of the solution valuable.

The cost of the solution is extremely high. Both Amazon and Azure cost extremely high. We think it over ten times before giving the solution to clients. No matter how many offerings the solution provides, it becomes a burden that you are not getting back your invested money from customers. This is the reason why these two services do not take off too much.

For example, you will end up paying somewhere around $20-30 per customer for data every month, which is extremely high. If we try to figure it out with some other things, we may come down to a certain sense. It is a couple thousand people, so a thousand times higher. I think that no business owner would want those things.

I have been using this solution for around three years now.

Azure is stable and reliable.

The solution gives you good scalability. It helps you scale it as big as possible. However, the scaling comes with huge costs which can make customers go bankrupt.

I have not used tech support yet since there is so much documentation and other resources available. I find it to be very straightforward. It depends on how well you use it. I think they have done a good part since we do not require much support. We have reached out more to the support team of AWS since they have been very responsive.

The initial setup of AKS is complicated. The setup depends on the cluster, nodes, and lots of other things. There are also lots of extremely critical small devices. Moreover, you will have to pay them even while setting up the solution. It is not like you setup first and then pay for it.

The deployment was not easy and took a couple of months. It depends on how you scale the solution. The reason for taking time is based on the way you architecture it.

The licensing cost is high and depends on how much you use the solution. The nodes will cost you eight to ten thousand dollars per month for small organizations. Hence, small organizations will end up paying somewhere around $80,000-100,000 for very minimal data usage.

I would give the solution a nine out of ten since it is good. However, I would only recommend AKS to billion-dollar businesses that don’t mind spending. It is more for data storage, blockchain-related services, etc which offers very limited opportunities. So, I wouldn’t recommend it. There are multiple other ways to do it and improvise your profits rather than spending on those services.

AWS and Azure are cloud services. They are also known as enterprise serverless architecture. Previously, we used to have server rooms where we used to deploy on-premises. Since the inception of AWS and Azure, they want you to deploy all the data onto their cloud. They offer microservices to facilitate interaction in the cloud. That is where they make money.

We did the deployment for a production-based project. AWS has its own powerful Kubernetes. However, the cost of Azure was higher than Kubernetes at that time. But, there was something additional called Azure deployments. If you have your own product and want to deploy it into multiple client-related places or on-prem solutions, you need to download it as a blueprint and then upload it onto one more system, which is one great thing about Azure that Amazon does not provide.

Kubernetes services, also known as elastic services, come with more clusters and is also very expensive. Suppose, your product needs to be used by just four organizations and a couple of hundred of their users have minimum use, you will end up paying eight to ten thousand dollars in just a month. This is very, very, very high. Not many clients prefer paying a premium price for just a little data.

Both of the solutions need to be very cost-effective. I have found many clients struggle the moment they hear the cost aspect of the solution. If you have millions of data, then you will need to spend millions of dollars just for the hosting and clusters of the Kubernetes services. This is the reason why many people are not preferring the solution.

I am using AKS on a Cosmos DB database. AKS is similar to AWS in stability and scalability, but when used with C#, AKS is easier to deploy and better to use because I use .NET applications.

The documentation makes it easier to deploy AKS, so it is the most valuable feature.

The onboarding process could be improved. For example, when you open Azure's main port, it is not very easy to access the servers because you need to put your mail and password, and sometimes you need to configure the authenticator. Depending on the case, this could be a problem.

I have been using AKS for two years, and I am using the latest version.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The customer support has been good.

The initial setup was very easy.

I have not seen a return on investment since I have only used the solution in my company for two months.

The solution is not very expensive. It is expensive when used on the Cosmos DB database.

The solution has good documentation and is easy to use and deploy. AKS is a good place to start your business. I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

The most valuable features of AKS are scalability, deployability, and automation.

Configuration management and troubleshooting performance issues are difficult to solve and could be made easier. 

I have been using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for approximately one and a half years.

There are some performance issues with the stability. There is some fine-tuning needed.

I rate the stability of AKS a seven out of ten.

The solution is scalable.

Small to medium-sized businesses are best suited for AKS.

I rate the scalability of AKS a nine out of ten.

The support is excellent.

I rate the support AKS an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup can be complex and took a total of four weeks. However, the incremental deployment took a couple of days.

In the first step of implementation, we do an estimation and identify all of our independent modules and packaging needed.

I rate the initial setup of AKS a three out of ten.

The price of AKS is expensive. We pay approximately $10,000 monthly.

My advice for others is to focus more on packaging the individual models and cables before going to where the solution is situated.

I rate AKS a six out of ten.

We used the solution to integrate banking pipelines for our customers. Also, we integrated Kibana into AKS, and from there, we deployed their parts. The solution's features, like machine learning models and analytical tools, have also helped us.

The solution's valuable features include in-built volume controllers, integration, container orchestration, monitoring, PSI drivers, Github, Gitlab, CI/CD, etc.

There are a lot of features that should be included with AKS. Also, the solution is still growing; thus, many things must be improved. We are still testing the solution, but they should provide better monitoring services. Along with it, they should include in-built DR features.

We have been using the solution for two years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

We contacted the solution's customer service during the time of deployment. We also never needed the tech team's support, as the deployment is straightforward. The event architecture was required on our end; Microsoft doesn't help there. They provide basic help to establish the SaaS components.

I used Azure Virtual Desktop and Azure Migrate as well. Mostly, customers move their applications to AKS from the premise as they want active manageability of services. The other reason is credit plans. Customers prefer switching to services that offer them credit cards. Also, the pricing matters a lot. Even though the services are performing well, people opt for vendors offering a particular cloud that is low on cost.

The initial setup for testing purposes was easy. We just had to set some commands with a click, and it took around ten minutes to complete. During the final deployment, we required a code. It is a day long process.

The solution's pricing and licensing are structured on the basis of the use cases. Again, it depends on how many parts of a particular feature you require. There is a pricing calculator to get an aggregate cost based on the use cases, operating systems, storage capacity, etc. For Windows, the pricing depends on which side of the node you are using, i.e., Dual-core 4 GB RAM or Dual-core 8 GB RAM. It is possible to receive discounts on pricing with reserve incentives. In this case, it relies on how many VMs you run in the back end.

I advise others to initiate with basic services of the solution and then explore further. It is easy to maintain the solution. We can view and monitor all the processes through its monitoring feature. I rate the solution as a nine.

The AKS service is used as container orchestration for a product based on microservice architecture and as computing layer abstraction.

The solution helped the organization improve the availability and scalability of the product by making use of self-healing and autoscaling features offered.

The solution is a managed Kubernetes, allowing to offload of a large part of the maintenance tasks to the cloud service provider. This allows the team to focus more on features that have a greater business impact, rather than on maintenance tasks.

The solution provides a good foundation but there is a good amount of work to do to reach a full-fledged production grade platform.

There is an entire ecosystem of tooling around the solution. 

Th solution could be an improved by providing an add-on ready to install for the most common tooling around Kubernetes.

I have been using the solution for almost three years.

The platform is pretty mature.

The solution can easily adapt to the change of demand.

The initial setup has been very simplified and optimized compared to the effort required to deploy a self-hosted solution.

AKS provides a good level of elasticity allowing them to scale horizontally the platform based on demand.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

Maintenance is much easier than an on-prem/self-hosted Kubernetes platform. 

Many of the tasks are automated by the cloud provider.

We download the internal website to showcase our organization’s development and products and present it to customers in a web application.

Each component is deployed as a microservice in Kubernetes. The web application is deployed in Azure Kubernetes Service. Everything runs inside the Kubernetes only.

The main features of Azure Kubernetes Service are how it deploys and manages microservices and enables them to communicate. AKS can also group, classify, and log data. AKS makes it easy to deploy, maintain, and communicate between microservices.

The solution could provide more logging mechanisms and a good user interface.

I have been using Azure Kubernetes service for three years.

The product is stable.

AKS has been used for six years to deploy and manage containerized applications in production, development, and testing environments. AKS is a stable and reliable service, and we have not had any issues with it.

Between 100 to 1,000 internal customers are opening the site and logging in to see the feature labeled location, demo, reporting, etc. Scalability depends on what we are scaling. For example, we have two nodes for Development, four in production, and three for backup.

When there were some hiccups, we took up a Microsoft support ticket. They're very good and help us a lot to solve the issues. I have worked with them a couple of times.

The initial setup is very easy. There are seven to eight tabs. If you select all the tabs and go for a deployment, it may take up to ten to fifteen minutes to complete.

Generally, I write my scripts for Deployment. Sometimes, we use partial or batch scripting, using HCLA comments to parameterize the scripts based on the requirements. Otherwise, you can use Terraform scripting to deploy.

I did the deployment by myself. We generally use a third-party team to get their input, but I initially used open-source tools with AKS. I used these tools to write steps that can be taken and everything.

We have taken a three-year contract.

Kubernetes is simple. If somebody wants to divert their applications into multiple pieces broadly and maintain them for a longer duration and accessible support, AKS is a web application that hosts them into containers. AKS also provides good support.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is to host our applications for Azure Cloud, rather than hosting the application on our on-premises infrastructure. We are hosting our applications in Kubernetes in Azure Cloud. I work for a product waste company, central components wherein during the weekend the traffic is more and during the weekdays the traffic is less. During festival time, the web traffic is more. So we need some kind of automatic solution. When the web traffic is more, the Kubernetes Service auto-scales, increasing the number of resources like horizontal scaling or vertical scaling. And if the web traffic is less, it descales, like releasing some of the resources. Kubernetes helps in autoscaling and that is why we migrated from on-premises to Kubernetes.

The most valuable feature is the autoscaling and self-healing. In our application, we have multiple replicas. If one of the replicas is not working due to anything, a new replica is automatically created.

I would like to see a graphical user interface.

I have been working with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for the past three years.

There is excellent stability.

There is above-average scalability and we do have plans to increase our usage.

The initial setup is complex and not straightforward. I think it would be helpful if we had some type of script for the installation to make it easier.

We used a vendor team lens from the Mirantis company.

Minikube is one small Kubernetes cluster. With minikube, we can install this on our local laptop and we can practice. So to know Kubernetes, we have a concept of minikube which can be installed on a local laptop and we can practice Kubernetes commands. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) an eight.