3 years ago

Category: Business, Microsoft, Kubernetes, Hashicorp

Any cloud Kubernetes service is something of a balancing act between standardization and differentiation. There are some cloud features that you definitely want for virtual machines — like automatically replicating the operating system drive to persistent storage in case the hardware it’s running on gets shut down and the VM has to move to another host — that doesn’t make sense for Kubernetes.

If you want an overview of all your Kubernetes resources on Azure, you can now view them in the Azure portal (rather than using the kube-dashboard addon that’s deprecated with Kubernetes 1.19) and you can already use Azure Monitor to see the status of deployments, but for troubleshooting, you can now look at AKS resources in Azure Resource Health alongside all your other Azure resources.

With Kubernetes 1.21, AKS will transition to CSI storage drivers and CSI support for both Azure Files and Azure Disks is now in public preview.

So it makes sense that Microsoft is also highlighting new training for AKS on using scale to zero, discount spot node pricing and the Azure Policy add-on to manage CPU and RAM quotas, to get the advantages of Kubernetes in the cloud without unexpectedly high bills.