Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Reviews

We utilize Git as a hosting platform for our SaaS offering. Our focus lies in the financial services sector, encompassing lending and credit-related functionalities. AKS serves as the foundation for our operations, enabling us to host a broader platform that includes medical services and more. Typically, we construct a Kubernetes-based platform to facilitate access for our CyberArk teams, who deploy a wide range of services. Presently, our production environment comprises financial services, along with upcoming releases such as medical services and HR solutions. Our objective is to migrate our products, along with relevant knowledge, from traditional servers and application services to more advanced PaaS offerings. This serves as our primary use case.

The solution has benefited our company because we can scale to our needs.

The most valuable features of AKS are the full array of capabilities and robust security.

AKS has the potential to enhance pricing by enabling us to explore ways to increase cost transparency. However, it's important to note that this refers to computation costs rather than client costs. Our objective is to optimize efficiency and minimize unnecessary expenses. Therefore, we aim to identify which services within the platform can benefit from improved consumption patterns. This is the focus of our ongoing research, with the goal of maximizing computational power within the cluster. We aim to avoid situations where resources are reserved but not utilized effectively. Additionally, our strong emphasis on security ensures that we adhere to all relevant compliance standards, bolstering our overall trustworthiness.

While AKS itself may not require specific improvements, we are exploring various avenues for enhancing our overall architecture. For instance, we are considering the adoption of OpenShift due to its superior security enforcement capabilities. Although it is possible to address security concerns within AKS, we have found that OpenShift offers more robust solutions in this regard. We are actively researching and evaluating other options, such as Microsoft's offerings, to identify the best fit for our architectural requirements. Our focus lies on driving architectural improvements rather than solely relying on AKS to address these concerns.

I have been using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for approximately four years.

Throughout the cluster update process, we experienced a few expected glitches, including networking outages and region-specific disruptions. However, we were able to effectively handle and resolve each of these issues. It is important to acknowledge that such challenges are inherent to the system and are accounted for within our Service Level Agreement (SLA). We have developed strategies to mitigate and manage these glitches, ensuring that they do not significantly impact the overall performance and reliability of our services.

We use the solution on a constant basis.

The solution we offer is highly scalable, adapting to varying needs. Its scalability is designed to align with the limits and preferences you set, ensuring financial safety and control. The solution automatically scales up and down based on workload demands, effectively managing resources. It incorporates robust insights tools that continuously analyze the system's performance and determine optimal scaling actions. In certain cases, manual scaling may be preferred based on your own assessment, and the solution accommodates both automatic and manual scaling modes. The choice of scaling approach depends on the specific Service Level Agreement in place, allowing for flexibility and customization.

I rate the scalability of AKS an eight out of ten.

Overall the support from AKS could be better.

Support is available in various forms to address different types of issues. There is a general support option accessible to everyone, allowing for access based on the criticality of the problem and its impact on your business. While premium support is also provided, there are instances where the evaluation of a technical issue begins with basic questions, even for subscribers. This can lead to frustration as it may require spending additional time repeatedly describing the situation. Consequently, it would be beneficial for the support process to be more agile. When an issue occurs with AKS or within a specific region, it affects the entire application. Unless you have multiple clusters in different regions for high availability, relying on a single cluster is often the norm. In such cases, paying double just to account for potential regional crashes may not be feasible or desirable. Therefore, it would be preferable to include such considerations in the SLA or contractual agreement. This issue is not unique to AKS and can be observed with other cloud providers as well. The general support process involves engaging with people, and despite automation, different levels of experience and knowledge can influence the support experience. Consequently, it may take one to two hours to synchronize and connect with someone who can provide the necessary assistance.

I rate the support from AKS a six out of ten.

Neutral

I have experience using various similar solutions to AKS, and I have observed that issues and their effects are generally comparable across different cloud providers. The overall quality of service is similar. However, when comparing AKS to on-premise solutions, the managed service aspect is a significant advantage. With AKS, we don't need to handle cluster management, head management, or master nodes. Additionally, we benefit from pre-configured networking and disk setups, providing a fully functional production-ready solution with ease. On the other hand, with on-premise deployments, more effort and expertise are required, making it a costlier option. However, having an on-premise solution allows for greater customization and control, including the ability to choose specific operating systems that align with customers' IT policies or security requirements. This can be cumbersome when using a managed service, as we lack control over these aspects. In certain cases, we have deployed on-premise solutions to address specific needs, particularly in private SaaS setups. However, for the SaaS itself, we primarily rely on the SaaS offering from Azure or other cloud providers. Comparing the costs, on-premise solutions tend to be more expensive due to the additional management requirements. It's important to note that managing on-premise solutions often requires senior resources, and it's not feasible to rely on junior team members. This factor, along with the need to hire and maintain such resources, should be considered. For example, using the cloud may result in a reduced need for DevOps resources by around thirty percent compared to on-premise solutions.

The initial setup process is straightforward, requiring just a few mouse clicks. It is automated through the use of ARC, our automation tool. We utilize a configuration file that is triggered automatically by our CI/CD pipeline. When we need to create a cluster for a specific purpose, we initiate the process, and within a few minutes of the cluster being up and running, the site begins its deployment.

The deployment can be done in approximately five minutes, but it depends don't the resources available.

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

We do the implementation of the solution.

We have received a return on investment, of approximately 80 percent.

The pricing of the solution is dependent on the choice of virtual machines, specifically the amount of memory required. There are various options available, ranging from around twenty-five to even more choices to select from. This flexibility allows you to customize the pricing based on your specific needs. From my perspective, virtual machines in the cloud tend to be slightly more expensive compared to virtual machines offered directly by data centers. However, this cost is offset by the benefits of a managed service. Taking the overall picture into account, the managed service approach is advantageous. The pricing for the platform can vary, typically ranging from three hundred euros per month to two thousand euros per month, depending on the specific requirements and setup you choose.

You have the flexibility to choose different payment options based on your needs. You can opt for a pay-as-you-go model, where you pay for resources on a monthly basis. Alternatively, you have the option to make upfront payments for one year or three years. Choosing the three-year payment option can provide you with up to a forty percent discount. The payment plan you select depends on the projected duration of your usage. If you are confident that you will require the service for a longer period, opting for the discounted upfront payment can be a cost-effective choice. The configurable nature of the payment options allows you to align your budget and experience in utilizing these services effectively.

I have evaluated many solutions.

The usage of the platform is generally straightforward and easy to understand. However, it is advisable to remain vigilant when it comes to pricing, particularly if you have enabled automatic elasticity. While you can set up budget limits and other controls, it is important to be aware that once you start utilizing cloud services, you may increasingly realize the power and benefits they offer, leading to a growing need for additional services. Additionally, it is recommended to exercise caution when using Synapse, a specific component of the platform.

I rate AKS an eight out of ten.

We use AKS for most of our Azure cloud services, including performance testing and other applications we deploy on an Azure Kubernetes cluster. 

AKS is easy to use. We can scale up and down as needed with AKS, which saves us money on our cloud costs. 

I would like to see Azure implement something like the K9 terminal for interacting with Kubernetes clusters. It's a user-friendly CLI interface.

I have used AKS for around six months.

I rate AKS nine out of 10 for stability. 

I rate AKS eight out of 10 for scalability. 

The initial deployment was challenging because I had trouble understanding the documentation. I didn't have this issue with Google Cloud Platform or AWS, but Azure seemed a little difficult. 

I rate Azure Kubernetes Service eight out of 10. I strongly recommend it. 

We need Kubernetes to manage some applications and containers. We use this product as an organizational service.

It makes it easier for us to scale the systems. We don't have to worry about standalone systems failing. It employs high availability. 

The usability is great. You can use it out of the box. When you use Azure with Kubernetes, it provides a managerial layer to make it easier to create environments.

Azure basically provides you with a management layer that does the device handling of our two monitors. It actually makes it much easier to handle containers and manage everything seamlessly.

The stability is okay.

The solution can scale.

Technical support is helpful and responsive. 

There are no missing features.

It needs better secrets management. It would be nice if they could handle the management of personal information more efficiently.

Debugging can be a difficult process. 

From day to day perspective, we've been happy with it.

I've used the solution for three years. 

It's largely stable. That said, we had a few issues where we would have to do some debugging.

The stability is okay. However, debugging is not easy. If it does go down, it's hard to examine the logs in the way you could with an on-prem solution. 

The solution is extremely scalable. I'd rate it nine out of ten.

Our users don't even know the solution exists. It's not visible. However, many people use it every day. 25 developers and engineers are exposed to it.

We are increasing usage and plan to increase more. That's our goal. 

Microsoft support is better than IBM's. It's got good support.

We were using Elastica Container Service and AWS.

Ultimately, we had no choice but to use this solution as this is an Azure shop.

The setup is straightforward. 

We are using the latest version. 

If you plan to use this solution, you have to be good at troubleshooting, and you need to understand containerization really well. You need to know how to debug and understand other Azure products as well as Kubernetes. This is not for non-technical users. 

I'd rate the solution 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.

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.

It is a hosting platform for creating web applications and deploying them. 

The serverless capability and auto scale feature are the most valuable. 

More control over Infra scanning can be introduced. 

I have been using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for ten months. 

The stability of the solution needs improvement. I rate the stability a six out of ten.

It is a scalable solution but can be further improved based on the user requirements. Presently, a few hundred users are using the solution. I rate the scalability a seven out of ten.

The initial setup is easy. Some log maintenance is needed. I rate the setup an eight out of ten. 

The pricing of the solution is same as Azure Stack. 

It really depends upon the usage. If they really have the use case to go cloud, they can use it, but still, it is more applicable for people who want to get into software engineering and web development. Especially in the financial domain or e-commerce, where you would be relying on websites. 

I rate the overall solution a seven 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.

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.