Industrial Use-Case of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience and enterprise-grade security and governance. It is an open-source fully managed container orchestration service that is available on the Microsoft Azure public cloud that can be used to deploy, scale and manage Docker containers and container-based applications in a cluster environment.Azure Kubernetes Service offers provisioning, scaling, and upgrades of resources as per requirement.

AKS is certainly an ideal platform for developers to develop their modern applications using Kubernetes on the Azure architecture where Azure Container Instances are the pretty right choice to deploy containers on the public cloud. The Azure Container Instances help in reducing the stress on developers to deploy and run their applications on Kubernetes architecture.

Features

• Elastic provisioning of capacity without the need to manage the infrastructure and with the ability to add event-driven auto scaling and triggers through KEDA.
• Faster end-to-end development experience through Visual Studio Code Kubernetes tools, Azure DevOps and Azure Monitor.
• Easily define, deploy, debug and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes applications and automatically containerize your applications.
• Add a full CI/CD pipeline to your AKS clusters with automated routine tasks and set up a canary deployment strategy in seconds.
• Use Azure Advisor to optimize your Kubernetes deployments with real-time, personalized recommendations.
• Save on costs by using deeply discounted capacity with Azure Spot.
• Achieve higher availability and protect applications from data center failures using availability zones.
• Available in more regions than other cloud providers.

How Siemens Healthineers are improving healthcare using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Siemens Healthineers is leading the digitalization of healthcare with its Digital Ecosystem, which helps health providers and solution developers bring more value to the delivery of care, ultimately improving the quality of insights derived from healthcare data. The company provides a broad portfolio of leading-edge, high-quality medical technology that touches the lives of approximately five million patients every day. Siemens Healthineers uses the data gathered from its 600,000 systems running worldwide to generate insights that help healthcare providers realize new opportunities to increase value and improve clinical, operational, and financial outcomes.

Siemens Healthineers uses Microsoft Azure to make solutions more accessible, and it uses Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and other tools for a fast, efficient, and competitive development pipeline.

The Siemens Healthineers Digital Ecosystem

Azure Traffic Manager

It is a DNS-based traffic load balancer. This service allows you to distribute traffic to your public facing applications across the global Azure regions. Traffic Manager also provides your public endpoints with high availability and quick responsiveness. Traffic Manager uses DNS to direct the client requests to the appropriate service endpoint based on a traffic-routing method. Traffic manager also provides health monitoring for every endpoint.

Azure Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database for modern app development. Single-digit millisecond response times, and automatic and instant scalability, guarantee speed at any scale. Azure Cosmos DB takes database administration off your hands with automatic management, updates and patching.

Azure Application Gateway?

Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 — TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port.

Azure Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage helps you create data lakes for your analytics needs and provides storage to build powerful cloud-native and mobile apps. Optimise costs with tiered storage for your long-term data and flexibly scale up for high-performance computing and machine learning workloads.

Angular

It a full-fledged application framework in which you can build complete enterprise applications. It’s platform agnostic, so you can run it in a web browser or put it into a mobile application to run on all sorts of devices.

.NET Core and ASP.NET

With .NET Core, our customers can now run the software on a wide spectrum of devices. It also gives us strong benefits with regard to operation costs in the cloud, because we can use it to run some workloads on Linux machines.”

ASP.NET Core offers a great way to surface RESTful APIs to an external audience.

Using Azure services to streamline development processes

With a solid, dependable cloud platform in place, Siemens Healthineers is focusing on speeding development and implementing a continuous delivery approach. The company not only provides its own software products, but it has also decided to encourage other developers to use its infrastructure to deliver solutions and services and bring even more value to customers. This requires rethinking the development processes.

Siemens Healthineers has taken a containerized approach to application development, which means it uses virtualization at the application operating system level as opposed to launching virtual machines. The company deploys its distributed applications in Docker containers, orchestrates those containers using Kubernetes, and monitors and manages the environment with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Developers can quickly and easily work with their applications with minimal operations and maintenance overhead — provisioning, upgrading, and scaling resources without taking applications offline.

Managing a stable runtime environment with AKS helps to shorten release cycles and achieve its desired continuous delivery approach. Highly regulated environments like healthcare typically require many steps to go from development to public release, but implementing a continuous delivery pipeline has simplified the process. And when rolling out new software, the company appreciates that it doesn’t have to worry about breaking its production environment, due to AKS upgrade and failure domains — new releases get deployed smoothly to customers with zero downtime.

Siemens relies on a serverless application model to expedite development, and as a result, developers have a very short path from coding to actual operation of their code. The Siemens Healthineers development team also adopted Azure Functions to make application management more efficient.

Making the best use of data and devices

Siemens Healthineers has brought in additional Azure capabilities that help deliver insights from data and offer the best possible tools for the healthcare industry. The biggest benefit is that we can have one database for anonymous data that is replicated worldwide into all regions that are relevant for us, in a consistency model that perfectly fits our needs. It’s key that Azure Cosmos DB is naturally built into the Azure core infrastructure, and helps ton build on its high availability and replication, offering software to customers at the same time.”

Delivering applications that optimize the business

The company’s use of Azure services has a direct impact on the development life cycle, but those improvements benefit the business side as well. Siemens Healthineers is reducing the total cost of ownership of its production workloads, creating more flexibility in the business models and pricing structure it can offer its customers.

Using Azure Kubernetes Service puts us into a position to not only deploy our business logic in Docker containers, including the orchestration, but also … to easily manage the exposure and control and meter the access.

Thomas Gossler: Lead Architect, Digital Ecosystem Platform