Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Reviews

We use AKS as part of our CI/CD pipeline.

We utilize a combination of custom microservice applications and open-source software, including tools like AKS. Additionally, some of the open-source applications we employ are accessed through subscription models. The primary tools we use are web-based applications, and Microsoft services play a significant role in supporting our traditional services.

There are concerns about potential disruptions or outages, given the power infrastructure challenges in our country. This is why we are considering alternative cloud options. There is room for improvement in automation processes, as well.

I have been working with it for five years.

We had a positive experience within the Azure Cloud environment, but the connection between clients and on-premises resources can be challenging. This is a significant concern for us because, at times, our compound fiber experiences outages due to firewall issues. In some instances, even with a side-to-side connection, we've encountered stability issues. It's important to note that this is not solely an Azure issue but rather a broader challenge we face.

It offers good scalability features.

Their support is exceptional, and we've consistently had a positive experience with them. If I were to rate their performance on a scale of one to ten, it would be a solid ten.

Positive

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. We didn't have any issues with it.

The deployment takes a few days. We have a dedicated team of engineers, typically numbering between three to five individuals, who are responsible for managing it.

It is a cost-effective solution.

It is very user-friendly and incredibly straightforward. It allows us to establish infrastructure rapidly, making it our preferred choice over other providers. I would rate it ten out of ten.

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 have two primary use cases of this solution. One, we deploy microservices for our customers using the Kubernetes cluster. For example, we have deployed Kafka on Kubernetes as well as Azure functions, which uses the same Kubernetes cluster. 

The other use case is for our internal usage. We only have microservices and Azure Functions, we don't have elastic or data. We do have a tight integration between Azure services and Kubernetes. The concept is called KEDA, or Kubernetes event-driven autoscaling. This means that if there are no services messaging you, Kubernetes usage will be zero. However, if there is a burst of traffic for my services, Kubernetes will create accordingly. 

The most valuable feature of AKS is that when I am sitting at the cluster, I can ensure compliance. Compliance is easy right out-of-the-box with integration to Azure Security, Azure Active Directory, and Azure Policies. The entire cluster is secure by design and not added as an afterthought. 

The other feature I like about AKS is that because of ransomware attacks, Microsoft has released specific guidance on threat matters. AKS is based on framework. This framework uses the proper guidance architect to tell you how the cluster should be designed. 

Another valuable feature is that AKS tells you exactly what you should do with each threat. It will guide you to improve the cluster, deploy something on the cluster, operate the cluster, and when you are trying to heal the cluster. It is very actionable.

Unfortunately, when a microservice fails, Azure can take up to 60 seconds to broadcast an alert to the monitoring agents. For a lot of the microservices, this is too late, particularly for serious failures.

Microsoft would benefit by offering enhanced learning and certification. Kubernetes is now mainstream and becoming more and more integral. Creating an Azure Kubernetes certification would ensure there are specialists in the market that could adapt best practices in a more structured fashion. 

I have been using Azure Kubernetes Service for three years.

The solution is stable. In the past three years, I have never experienced any serious problems.

We have internally two people to maintain AKS and for our customers, we have multiple people. There are a couple of DevOps resources who are trained in Terraform and are Azure DevOps certified who operate the cluster. 

We rely upon monitoring and alert mechanisms. Basically, we do not need to be on the server with a dedicated resource. We only need to look at the alerts, as the solution is self-healing. 

Scalability depends on how the architect designs the cluster. Once a Kubernetes cluster is up and running, the auto-scaling works according to the basic design. If I need a different node pool, then I need to create a design cluster. If this is done correctly, scalability by design or architecture is not an issue. It is up to the individual architects to be disciplined in considering future needs and build in flexibility.

The initial setup of AKS is a breeze. Straight out of the box, with experience, it takes only 30 minutes. Setting up a secure cluster takes only 30 minutes. I use Terraform extensively, so it is pretty easy to set up. I would rate the initial setup a five out of five for ease of setup.

I did the deployment of AKS myself with two other people. One from networking with an infrastructure point of view to handle the set-up of the V-Net by controlling the IP address range. The other person is the one who manages Azure Active Directory.

There is an initial infrastructure cost, however, the more services you deploy, the cost per service comes down drastically because you are leveraging the underlying infrastructure. As you scale your operations, AKS becomes more cost-effective.

The cost of AKS is humongous, it is very expensive. You are charged based on the nodes, the networking, and the storage. Multi-clusters are another consideration, especially if you need to add firewalls.

It is important to keep in mind that the cost is not just the licensing, but also the human resource cost. Every organization should have some idea about what they should be putting into Kubernetes together with the type of people, and types of resources required to monitor, alert, and operate the solution.

Compared to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and OpenShift, Microsoft Azure has very specific guidance on how to secure an entire cluster with multiple inputs. This is really phenomenal. This guidance is missing in the other products.

Anyone considering AKS as a solution should be sure they consider the design carefully and give a lot of focus to the initial setup. 

I also recommend that the organization is clear on what its end goal is, otherwise they will incur too many additional costs. 

Lastly, keep in mind that it is difficult for the executive level to understand what Kubernetes is and that it is not the answer to everything.

Overall, I would rate Azure Kubernetes Service a seven out of ten.

Our customers use the solution to develop their business applications.

The solution's dashboard integration with Kubernetes helps us manage workloads easily.

They should work on improving the solution's integration with API. They should add an option for installing open-source tools such as Kube-State-Metrics to leverage the community.

We have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is more stable than EKS. Although, we face some issues while upgrading it. I rate its stability as an eight.

Our customers have around 50-60 developers using the solution in their organizations. I rate its scalability as an eight.

The solution's customer service team resolves the technical issues accurately. But it takes a long time to reply to queries.

The solution is simple to install compared to AWS, which needs many prerequisites to follow.

The solution is expensive compared to other vendors. I rate its pricing as a five.

I have evaluated IBM Cloud, GKE, and AWS. They all are similar to AKS and have a few advantages over it. But AKS is better than them in terms of implementation, scalability, accessibility, and overall services.

The solution is excellent. But sometimes, it couldn't provide specific metrics. In addition, integrating it with Azure's metric app also fails to generate the expected results.

I rate the solution as a seven.

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.

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.