Consider these two bullets:

• Gartner "By 2020 more than 50% of the enterprises will run mission-critical containerized cloud-native applications in production"
• AKS usage has grown 10X since it went GA in 2018 making it one of the fastest-growing Azure services.

In four years, Kubernetes has gone from an open-source orchestrator to being accepted as the inaugural project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), to now when it's undoubtedly seen as the container orchestration standard. Strong community support for Kubernetes can be gauged by the fact that, in terms of a number of authors/issues, it is No. 2 (with No. 1 being Linux) across all projects on GitHub.

Today, Kubernetes as a service is available on all major public cloud platforms, including Azure. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a "managed" offering. This means that it greatly reduces the complexity and operational overhead of managing Kubernetes. AKS handles critical tasks like health monitoring and maintenance. AKS also natively integrates with Azure platform services like Azure Active Directory, Log Analytics, and Azure Virtual Network. Finally, AKS enjoys a rich ecosystem of development tools such as Helm, Draft, and extension for Visual Studio Code.

In summary, if you're building a container-packaged, microservices-oriented application, it's more than likely that such an application will need to run on a dynamically managed cluster such as AKS (for optimal use of resources and lowering overall TCO).

In this deep-dive workshop on "all things Kubernetes," we'll start with a discussion on design principles around microservices. Next, we'll review Kubernetes concepts in detail. Finally, we'll dive deep into AKS itself and how it integrates with other Azure services.

You will learn:

• Kubernetes essentials
• AKS key concepts
• Patterns and practices for micro services development