Azure Kubernetes Services (Aks) Made Easy

Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) Made Easy: A Comprehensive and Practical Course

What you'll learn

How AKS works and its components

Basic and advanced AKS features

Integrations of AKS with other Azure services or third-party and open-source products

How to manage, administer or deploy containerized applications in AKS

Requirements

It is good to have basic knowledge of Linux, Networking, Kubernetes and Azure, but I am explaining most of the concepts at specific points in the course

Description

In today's fast-paced and dynamic business environment, containerization and orchestration are becoming increasingly important. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration and management, providing organizations with the flexibility and scalability needed to manage modern applications.Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service that eliminates the complexity of managing and scaling your Kubernetes infrastructure, enabling you to focus on building and deploying your applications. AKS offers benefits such as seamless integration with other Azure services, rapid deployment and scaling, automatic upgrades, built-in security and compliance, and much more.This course is meant to make AKS easy to learn, understand, and to provide students with a comprehensive and practical experience with AKS.The course start with an introduction about containers and Kubernetes, then we will cover topics such as creating and managing Kubernetes clusters, understand the components at Kubernetes and Azure level, configuring networking with respect to network plugins, Kubernetes services, SNAT, outbound types and types of AKS clusters in relation to control plane access, like public or private AKS clusters and the ones with VNET integration.Security will be the next topics and we will start with a section about AKS-managed Active Directory integration, then we will look gain knowledge of identities, certificates, network policies, how to use secrets from the Azure Key Vault, about Azure policy, Microsoft Defender, AppArmor, and SecComp.Scaling is important, so we will discover resource reservations, Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), Vertical Pod Autoscaler, Cluster Autoscaler (CAS), Virtual Nodes add-on, and KEDA.The next section will be Storage, and you will learn how to use Azure Disk, including snapshot, resize, Azure File, and Azure Blob in AKS.Then, we will discover the monitoring and troubleshooting chapter, where we will learn default available features as well as enabling Container Insights or managed Prometheus and Grafana.Subsequent to this, we will learn about upgrades and related features like auto-upgrade or planned maintenance, then how to integrate our AKS cluster with the Azure Container Registry.After this, we will focus on ingress controllers, like application gateway ingress controllers (AGIC) and nginx ingress controllers, and how to expose an application via HTTPS or how to use Let's Encrypt and Cert Manager.Finally, we will focus on high availability, and you will learn about available tiers, availability zones, and how to obtain reliability while routing traffic between multiple AKS clusters.By the end of this course, you will be equipped with the skills and knowledge to effectively deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters in AKS, and to leverage the benefits of AKS in the industry, including faster application development, improved scalability, and increased flexibility.

Overview

Section 1: Introduction

Lecture 1 Introduction about instructor and course

Lecture 2 Good to have / Recommended background

Lecture 3 Connect with me

Section 2: Understanding containers

Lecture 4 What is a container and how is it different from a VM?

Lecture 5 Microservices architecture

Lecture 6 What are Docker, Dockerfile and Docker Hub?

Lecture 7 Creating our first container app (web app), pushing it to Docker Hub and running

Lecture 8 Create our 2nd container app (troubleshooting app), push it to DHub and run it

Lecture 9 Understanding why we need a container orchestrator, like Kubernetes

Section 3: What is Kubernetes?

Lecture 10 Introduction to Kubernetes

Lecture 11 Kubernetes architecture

Lecture 12 Self-managed vs Cloud-managed Kubernetes cluster

Section 4: Starting with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Lecture 13 What is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?

Lecture 14 Azure pricing, free account and AKS cost

Lecture 15 Let's create our first AKS cluster

Lecture 16 Install CLI, explore Azure Cloud Shell, connect to the cluster

Lecture 17 aks-preview extension and feature registration

Lecture 18 Making our life easier with autocompletion, alias, Kubernetes and AKS extension

Lecture 19 Imperative and declarative approaches

Lecture 20 Practice with Nodes, Pod, Deployment, Replicaset, DaemonSet, Service, Secret, CM

Lecture 21 Understanding our CIDRs

Lecture 22 What is a node pool?

Lecture 23 Connect to AKS nodes - quick demo

Lecture 24 Exploring the AKS cluster - Kubernetes side

Lecture 25 kubelet

Lecture 26 containerd

Lecture 27 azure-ip-masq-agent

Lecture 28 cloud-node-manager

Lecture 29 coredns

Lecture 30 coredns-autoscaler

Lecture 31 CSI

Lecture 32 konnectivity

Lecture 33 kube-proxy

Lecture 34 metrics-server

Lecture 35 Exploring the AKS cluster - Azure infrastructure side

Lecture 36 Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS)

Lecture 37 Virtual Network (VNET) and Subnet (SNET)

Lecture 38 Network Security Group (NSG)

Lecture 39 Route Table (RT)

Lecture 40 Load Balancer (LB) and Public IP (PIP)

Lecture 41 Managed Identity (MI)

Lecture 42 Important notes about AKS support policy

Lecture 43 Stop and Start feature

Lecture 44 About kubeconfig and how to work with multiple AKS clusters

Section 5: Working with node pools and nodes

Lecture 45 VM types: VMSS (Scale Set) vs VMAS (Availability Set)

Lecture 46 Understanding System and User node pool types

Lecture 47 Connect to AKS nodes - using helper pod

Lecture 48 Connect to AKS nodes - via SSH using Azure Bastion

Lecture 49 Connect to AKS nodes - via SSH using a pod

Lecture 50 Connect to AKS nodes - run-command invoke

Lecture 51 Node's Operating Systems is AKS

Lecture 52 Node pool with Mariner OS

Lecture 53 Create Windows node pool and connect to nodes

Lecture 54 Schedule pods on specific node pools or specific OS type nodes

Lecture 55 Customize node configuration using az aks parameters

Lecture 56 Customize node configuration using DaemonSet

Lecture 57 OS disk types

Lecture 58 Default OS disk sizes

Lecture 59 Spot node pools

Lecture 60 GPU node pools

Lecture 61 Node pool snapshot

Lecture 62 Resize a node pool

Section 6: Networking in AKS

Lecture 63 Kubenet network plugin

Lecture 64 Azure CNI network plugin

Lecture 65 Azure CNI overlay network plugin

Lecture 66 Network plugins comparison

Lecture 67 Bring your own VNET/subnet, NSG and Route Table in AKS

Lecture 68 A deeper look into LoadBalancer Service in AKS

Lecture 69 Consideration when multiple NSGs are used

Lecture 70 Kubernetes Internal Load Balancer

Lecture 71 Understand VNET Peering

Lecture 72 SNAT in Azure

Lecture 73 Outbound types: Load Balancer, NAT Gateway and UserDefinedRouting (UDR)

Lecture 74 Create AKS with NAT Gateway

Lecture 75 Create AKS with UDR and Azure Firewall

Section 7: Types of clusters in relation to control plane access

Lecture 76 Types of clusters in relation to control plane access

Lecture 77 Explore public AKS cluster

Lecture 78 Create public AKS cluster with VNET integration

Lecture 79 API server authorized IP ranges

Lecture 80 Create and connect to general and VNET integration private AKS cluster

Lecture 81 az aks invoke command

Lecture 82 Run kubectl commands from worker nodes

Section 8: AKS-managed Active Directory integration

Lecture 83 Understanding AKS-managed AAD integration with Azure RBAC and Kubernetes RBAC

Lecture 84 Prepare the environment for Azure RBAC

Lecture 85 Practice Azure RBAC

Lecture 86 Use custom role with Azure RBAC

Lecture 87 Prepare the environment for Kubernetes RBAC

Lecture 88 Practice Kubernetes RBAC

Lecture 89 Local accounts

Section 9: Security and identities in AKS

Lecture 90 Identities in AKS

Lecture 91 Create an AKS cluster with service principal

Lecture 92 Certificate rotation

Lecture 93 Network policies in AKS

Lecture 94 Azure Key Vault Provider for Secrets Store CSI Drive

Lecture 95 Use autorotation for Azure Key Vault Secret Provider add-on

Lecture 96 Azure Policy for Kubernetes

Lecture 97 Microsoft Defender for Containers in AKS

Lecture 98 AppArmor in AKS

Lecture 99 Seccomp in AKS

Section 10: Scaling in AKS

Lecture 100 Understand resource reservations

Lecture 101 Manually scale pod replicas and node count

Lecture 102 Stop/deallocate nodes with Scale-down mode

Lecture 103 Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA)

Lecture 104 Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA)

Lecture 105 Cluster Autoscaler (CAS)

Lecture 106 Virtual nodes add-on for AKS

Lecture 107 KEDA in AKS

Section 11: Storage in AKS

Lecture 108 Exploring the storage options in AKS

Lecture 109 Dynamically create Azure Disk

Lecture 110 Create snapshot and restore Azure Disk

Lecture 111 Resize Azure Disk

Lecture 112 Statically create Azure File

Lecture 113 Use a custom StorageClass to create Azure File with private endpoint and GRS

Lecture 114 Use a StatefulSet to dynamically create Azure Blob

Section 12: Monitor and troubleshoot AKS

Lecture 115 Activity logs

Lecture 116 Diagnose and solve problems and Ask Genie

Lecture 117 Resource Health and Azure Status

Lecture 118 Azure Advisor

Lecture 119 Metrics explorer for AKS

Lecture 120 Metrics explorer for AKS related resources

Lecture 121 Azure Monitor with Container Insights in AKS

Lecture 122 Explore Insights

Lecture 123 Explore Workbooks

Lecture 124 Explore Logs

Lecture 125 Understanding Alerts

Lecture 126 Create out-of-the-box Alert

Lecture 127 Create custom Alert

Lecture 128 Diagnostics settings in AKS

Lecture 129 Monitor AKS with managed Prometheus and Grafana

Section 13: Upgrade an AKS cluster

Lecture 130 Understanding K8s version, node image, the upgrade and why we need to upgrade

Lecture 131 Auto-upgrade Feature

Lecture 132 Planned Maintenance Feature

Lecture 133 What to check to prevent an upgrade failure

Lecture 134 Performing a Kubernetes version upgrade - All at once

Lecture 135 Performing a Kubernetes version upgrade - Blue green

Lecture 136 Performing a node image upgrade

Section 14: Integrate AKS with Azure Container Registry (ACR)

Lecture 137 What is Azure Container Registry (ACR) and how the integration works?

Lecture 138 Create ACR and push/import our apps to it

Lecture 139 Integrate AKS and ACR - Azure/RBAC method

Lecture 140 Integrate AKS and ACR - Kubernetes/pull secret method

Lecture 141 Securely connect to ACR via a private connection

Section 15: Ingress controllers in AKS

Lecture 142 What is an ingress controller?

Lecture 143 Using Application Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC)

Lecture 144 Expose apps using a domain name on HTTPS

Lecture 145 Using nginx-ingress-controller in AKS

Lecture 146 Expose App on HTTPS with Cert-Manager and Let's Encrypt

Section 16: High Availability in AKS

Lecture 147 Free and Standard tiers for AKS cluster management

Lecture 148 Availability Zones in AKS

Lecture 149 Use Azure Front Door to route traffic between multiple AKS clusters

Lecture 150 Use custom domain and Azure Front Door certificate to expose apps in AKS

Any beginner that just started with Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS),Cluster Administrators who are going to manage AKS clusters,Developers who are planning to host applications in AKS,Architects looking to implement AKS with other services,Anyone who is looking to learn a new skill