Containers and Services

Using containers and DuploCloud Services with Azure AKS

Viewing Services

Once the deployment commands run successfully, click the Services tile on the Tenants page. Your deployments are displayed and you can now attach load balancers for the services.

DuploCloud Services and Containers

Containers and Services are critical elements of deploying AKS applications in the DuploCloud platform. Containers refer to Docker containers: lightweight, standalone packages that contain everything needed to run an application including the code, runtime, system tools, libraries, and settings. Services in DuploCloud are microservices defined by a name, Docker image, and a number of replicas. They can be configured with various optional parameters and are mapped to Kubernetes deployment sets or StatefulSets, depending on whether they have stateful volumes.

Container Orchestration

DuploCloud supports deploying containerized applications in Azure using AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service).

AKS

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed service on Microsoft Azure that uses Kubernetes to orchestrate containerized applications. AKS integrates seamlessly with other Azure services, providing a streamlined experience for deploying and scaling containers in the Azure ecosystem. While AKS demands a higher learning curve than Azure’s simpler container services, it allows users to leverage the extensive tools and flexibility of Kubernetes, offering robust scalability, customization, and portability across environments.

Kubernetes

Adding a Service in the DuploCloud Platform is not the same as adding a Kubernetes service. When you deploy DuploCloud Services, the platform implicitly converts your DuploCloud Service into either a deployment set or a StatefulSet. The service is mapped to a deployment set if there are no volume mappings. Otherwise, it is mapped to a StatefulSet, which you can force creation of if needed. Most configuration values are self-explanatory, such as Images, Replicas, and Environmental Variables.

Kubernetes clusters are created during Infrastructure setup using the Administrator -> Infrastructure option in the DuploCloud Portal. The cluster is created in the same Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) as the Infrastructure. Building an Infrastructure with an AKS cluster may take some time.

Next, you deploy an application within a Tenant in Kubernetes. The application contains a set of VMs, a Deployment set (Pods), and an application Load Balancer. Pods can be deployed either through the DuploCloud Portal or through kubectl,using HelmCharts.

When you create a service, refer to the registry configuration in Docker -> Services | Kubernetes -> Services. Select the Service from the NAME column and select the Configuration tab. Note the values in the Environment Variables and Other Docker Config fields.

For example:

{"DOCKER_REGISTRY_CREDENTIALS_NAME":"registry1"}