Upgrading Azure #Kubernetes Cluster and Set #Azure monitor Alerts on #AKS

Current version of Kubernetes on Microsoft Azure.

Upgrading Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) makes it simple to deploy a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure. AKS reduces the complexity and operational overhead of managing Kubernetes by offloading much of that responsibility to Azure. As a hosted Kubernetes service, Azure handles critical tasks like health monitoring and maintenance for you. In addition, the service is free, you only pay for the agent nodes within your clusters, not for the masters.

AKS clusters support Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). An AKS cluster can also be configured to integrate with Azure Active Directory. In this configuration, Kubernetes access can be configured based on Azure Active Directory identity and group membership.
For more information, see, Integrate Azure Active Directory with AKS.

From here I will do a step-by-step Upgrade of a Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Cluster to a newer version and set Azure Monitor alert rule active for the future to get an Alert notification when a colleague is upgrading the AKS Services.

Here you see all the newer versions of Kubernetes.

Upgrading to version 1.11.1 of Kubernetes.

IMPORTANT NOTE :

When upgrading an AKS cluster, Kubernetes minor versions cannot be skipped. For example, upgrades between 1.8.x -> 1.9.x or 1.9.x -> 1.10.x are allowed, however 1.8 -> 1.10 is not. To upgrade, from 1.8 -> 1.10, you need to upgrade first from 1.8 -> 1.9 and then another do another upgrade from 1.9 -> 1.10

KubeCluster Activity Log

At the green arrow on this picture you can download the activities into CSV file. At the Red arrow you see the User ID who initiated the Upgrade of the Kubernetes Cluster. This is important information for Azure Alert monitoring.

10 minutes later Kubernetes Cluster is Upgraded to version 1.11.1

Upgrade is done.

We now do a minor Upgrade of Kubernetes from version 1.11.1 to 1.11.2 to get the newest version on Azure.
Click on 1.11.2 version and hit Save.

 

Microsoft Azure Monitoring Alerts

When you click on the second activity of the Upgrade you see at arrow 2 that you can add an Activity Log Alert by Azure monitoring.

Creating Rule Alerts.

1. Define Alert condition is already set. We want an Alert notification on Upgrading KubeCluster.
2. Define Alert details, must be set.
3. Define Action Group, must be set to create the Alert Rule.

2. Define the Alert Details.

3. Define Action Group : Click on + New Action Group

Click on OK

Created Action Group name AKSAdmins

An action group is a collection of notification preferences defined by the user. Azure Monitor and Service Health alerts are configured to use a specific action group when the alert is triggered. Various alerts may use the same action group or different action groups depending on the user’s requirements.

More information on Creating and managing action groups in the Azure portal can be found here

For information on how to use Azure Resource Manager templates to configure action groups, see Action group Resource Manager templates.

 

From here you can Create the Alert Rule and make it Active.

Azure Monitor Alerts with one rule Enabled.

Here is our Active KubeCluster Alert Rule.

Now we will get a notification when a Colleague is Upgrading our KubeCluster in the Future 😉

KubeCluster is now running the latest available version of Kubernetes.

Kubernetes Cluster nodes are Healthy and running version 1.11.2

Here you see in the Kubernetes Dashboard the Node version of Kubernetes.

For Developers and DevOps it’s Great to work with Microsoft Visual Studio Code and the Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) to work in a CI/CD Pipeline, to create continuous business applications in the Cloud.

Here is my Azure KubeCluster running in Visual Studio Code 🙂

And at last, most important thing is that my Application is running on my Azure Kubernetes Cluster for the Business My Test Site.

Hope this blogpost is useful for you and your business to manage your AKS Cluster in the Microsoft Cloud.

More information About Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) :

 Upgrade an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster via Azure CLI

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Docs

Monitor Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) container health (preview)

Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services website Start Free here

Follow Containers in the Cloud Community Group on LinkedIn

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Scale and Upgrade your Azure Kubernetes Cluster #AKS #Containers #Azure #Kubernetes #DevOps #Cloud

I start with a 2 Node Kubernetes Cluster.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) makes it simple to deploy a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure. AKS reduces the complexity and operational overhead of managing Kubernetes by offloading much of that responsibility to Azure. As a hosted Kubernetes service, Azure handles critical tasks like health monitoring and maintenance for you. In addition, the service is free, you only pay for the agent nodes within your clusters, not for the masters.

When you have a Web App like Joomla CMS running on Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) and you need more capacity or performance, you can really easy Scale-Up and Scale-Down when needed. It is easy to scale an AKS cluster to a different number of nodes. Select the desired number of nodes and run the az aks scale command. When scaling down, nodes will be carefully cordoned and drained to minimize disruption to running applications. When scaling up, the az command waits until nodes are marked Ready by the Kubernetes cluster.

Scaling your Azure Kubernetes Cluster (AKS)

In the following step-by-step guide I’m scaling my AKS Cluster from 2 nodes to 4 node Kubernetes Cluster :

Here you can scale your Cluster to the right Size
Click on Save to execute.

One AKS Cluster can Scale-Up to 100 vCPU’s and 350 GB of Memory 😉

It’s updating now my 2 Node AKS Cluster to 4 Nodes.
( wait a couple of minutes )

Done !

In Visual Studio Code a got 4 Nodes

In the AKS Cluster Health Monitor you see the Update of the Config.

When you open the Kubernetes Dashboard you see the load on the 4 Nodes.

When you don’t need a 4 Node Cluster performance and/or capacity any more because of the workload, you can scale your Cluster back to 2 Node Cluster for example.

Scaling down to 2 Node AKS Cluster.

Back to 2 Node Azure Kubernetes Cluster.

Just Refresh in Visual Studio Code
2 Node Cluster Again.

And my Joomla CMS Web App is running on 2 Node AKS Cluster.

This was Scaling your Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Cluster (AKS), the Next step-by-step guide I’m Upgrading my Azure Kubernetes Cluster (AKS) to a New version.

Upgrading your Azure Kubernetes Cluster (AKS)

My Current version of AKS is 1.10.5

I’m Upgrading to Kubernetes version 1.10.6
Click on Save to Execute.

After +/- 10 minutes my AKS Cluster was Up-to-Date.

with kubectl version you see the Changes in Visual Studio Code (VSC)

And of course you get notified by the Azure Portal when your Upgrade is Done 🙂

When you like to work from Azure CLI or Cloudshell or VSC you can Upgrade your Kubernetes Cluster from here

More information about Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) :

Kubernetes versions on GitHub

Kubernetes Documentation

Microsoft Azure AKS Docs

Hope this easy Quick Step-by-Step Guides are helpful for you and your Business.

A Great #Microservices E-book about Architecture for Containerized #dotnet Apps #Docker #Kubernetes #Containers

Enterprises are increasingly realizing cost savings, solving deployment problems, and improving DevOps and production operations by using containers. Microsoft has been releasing container innovations for Windows and Linux by creating products like Azure Container Service and Azure Service Fabric, and by partnering with industry leaders like Docker, Mesosphere, and Kubernetes. These products deliver container solutions that help companies build and deploy applications at cloud speed and scale, whatever their choice of platform or tools.
Docker is becoming the de facto standard in the container industry, supported by the most significant vendors in the Windows and Linux ecosystems. (Microsoft is one of the main cloud vendors supporting Docker.) In the future, Docker will probably be ubiquitous in any datacenter in the cloud or on-premises.
In addition, the microservices architecture is emerging as an important approach for distributed mission-critical applications. In a microservice-based architecture, the application is built on a collection of services that can be developed, tested, deployed, and versioned independent

You can download .NET Microservices Architecture for Containerized .NET Application E-book here

eShoponContainers 

#Microsoft Azure DevOps Projects and Infrastructure as Code #Azure #IaC #DevOps

Microsoft Azure DevOps Project for CI/CD

The Azure DevOps Project presents a simplified experience where you bring your existing code and Git repository, or choose from one of the sample applications to create a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipeline to Azure. The DevOps project automatically creates Azure resources such as a new Azure virtual machine, creates and configures a release pipeline in VSTS that includes a build definition for CI, sets up a release definition for CD, and then creates an Azure Application Insights resource for monitoring.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) gives you benefits like :

• Consistency in naming conventions of Azure components
• Working together in the same way with your company policies
• Reusability of Templates
• Automatic documentation and CMDB of deployments in your repository
• Rapid deployments
• Flexibility and Scalability in code for Azure Deployments

As an Large Enterprise Company you don’t want to Click and Type in the Azure Portal with lot of employees to get the job done in a consistent way. The changes and deployments will be different in time because people can make mistakes. For Developers it’s important to make your building process before you publish your application, so why not for DevOps and ITpro to do the same thing for Infrastructure.

In the following step-by-step guide you will learn how to make a Microsoft Azure DevOps Project and make a CI/CD Pipeline deploying a virtual machine with your ASP.net Application.

Prerequisites :
An Azure subscription. You can get one free through Visual Studio Dev Essentials.
Access to a GitHub or external Git repository that contains .NET, Java, PHP, Node, Python, or static web code.

Here you find the GitHub for Developer Guide

When you have your prerequisites in place you can start with the following steps :

Search for DevOps at All Services in the Azure Portal

Select .NET and Click on Next

You can see where you are in the flow of creating your CI/CD Pipeline, when you need a Azure SQL Database for your ASP.net application you can select Add a Database (Option). This will provide you Azure SQL as a Service (PaaS).

Database-as-a-Service
(I didn’t Choose for SQL)

In this step select Virtual Machine and click Next

From here you can create a VSTS account or your Existing account of Visual Studio Team Services. After selecting VSTS you can manage your Azure settings and by clicking on Change you can select the Azure options.

 

Select the Virtual Machine you need for your Application.

Here you see the Deployment Running

Important for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), the Deployment template can be saved into the library and / or you can download it for reusability or make your own policies into the template.

When you save it into the Azure Library you get the release notes and who’s the publisher

In the Microsoft Azure DevOps Project main Dashboard you will see the status of your CI/CD Pipeline and that release is in progress or not. On the right-side of the Dashboard you see the Azure resources like the Application endpoint, the Virtual Machine and Application Insights for monitoring. When the CI/CD Pipeline deployment is succeeded you can browse to your ASP.net Application.

Your Application.

Your Virtual Machine Running and in the Monitoring.

The Microsoft Azure DevOps Project CI/CD Pipeline is Completed.

Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for web developers on multiple platforms. Use it to monitor your live web application. It will automatically detect performance anomalies. It includes powerful analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and to understand what users actually do with your app. It’s designed to help you continuously improve performance and usability. It works for apps on a wide variety of platforms including .NET, Node.js and J2EE, hosted on-premises or in the cloud. It integrates with your DevOps process, and has connection points to a variety of development tools. It can monitor and analyze telemetry from mobile apps by integrating with Visual Studio App Center and HockeyApp.

You can drill down into the error to see what is happening.

Azure Application Insights topology

Application Insights is aimed at the development team, to help you understand how your app is performing and how it’s being used. It monitors:
Request rates, response times, and failure rates – Find out which pages are most popular, at what times of day, and where your users are. See which pages perform best. If your response times and failure rates go high when there are more requests, then perhaps you have a resourcing problem.
Dependency rates, response times, and failure rates – Find out whether external services are slowing you down.
Exceptions – Analyse the aggregated statistics, or pick specific instances and drill into the stack trace and related requests. Both server and browser exceptions are reported.
Page views and load performance – reported by your users’ browsers.
AJAX calls from web pages – rates, response times, and failure rates.
User and session counts.
Performance counters from your Windows or Linux server machines, such as CPU, memory, and network usage.
Host diagnostics from Docker or Azure.
Diagnostic trace logs from your app – so that you can correlate trace events with requests.
Custom events and metrics that you write yourself in the client or server code, to track business events such as items sold or games won.

You can also drill down into Microsoft Azure Log Analytics and run your analytics queries to get the right information you want for troubleshooting. More information on Azure Log Analytics and queries is on MSFT docs.

From App Insight we see it was an Exception error

Because the Azure DevOps Project is connected with VSTS you can follow the Build and Release here to and you got your documentation of the CI/CD Pipeline.

From here you can work with your Developers and DevOps and manage the User and Groups security in de CI/CD Pipeline for the next Build. Working together to build innovative apps via VSTS from one Dashboard :

VSTS Dashboard

Next day you see it was one time error and the Pipeline is running Fine 😉

For more information about all the possibilities with Microsoft Azure DevOps Project go to MSFT Docs

DevOps and Microsoft :

DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users.

To Learn DevOps please visit this Microsoft DevOps Site

Conclusion : 

Invest in your CI/CD Pipeline and make your own environment is important before you deploy into Azure production for your business. Make your ARM Templates and Code in repositories like Git or VSTS. When you have this all in place your are more in control of your consistent Deployments and Changes in the Azure Cloud. I hope this blogpost is useful for you and your Company. Start today with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and get the benefits 😉

#Microsoft Build 2018 Sessions and Content Overview #Azure #AzureStack #MSBuild2018

Microsoft Build 2018 – Technology Keynote: Microsoft Azure

With Scott Guthrie @scottgu

Inside Azure Datacenter Architecture

with Mark Russinovich @markrussinovich

Architecting and Building Hybrid Cloud Apps for Azure and Azure Stack.
With Filippo Seracini @pipposera and Ricardo Mendes @rifmendes from the AzureStack Team

Container DevOps in Azure
With Jessica Deen @jldeen and Steven Murawski @stevenmurawski

Best Practices with Azure & Kubernetes

Follow @rimmanehme

Microsoft Azure CosmosDB @ Build 2018 The Catalyst for next Generation Apps

From Zero to Azure with Python & VSC

Secure the intelligent edge with Azure Sphere

Satya Nadella – Vision Keynote

Here you can find all the Microsoft Build 2018 Sessions and content.

Deploy #Azure WebApp with Visual Studio Code and Play with #Kudu and App Service Editor and #VSC

When you have installed Microsoft Visual Studio Code which is Free and Open Source with Git integration, Debugging and lot of Extensions available,
You activate the Microsoft Azure App Service extension in VSC.

Azure App Service Extension

You can install really easy more Azure Extensions here.

On the Left you will see your Azure Subscription and by pushing the + you will create a new Azure WebApp.

Enter the name of the Resource Group

Select your OS Windows or Linux

Add the Name of the New App Service Plan

Choose a App Service plan See more information here

Select Azure Region

After this it will install your Microsoft Azure Web App in the Cloud in a couple of seconds 🙂

 

When you open the Azure Portal you will see your App Service plan running.

From here you can configure your Azure Web App for Continues Delivery, and use different tools like VSC, Kudu or Azure App Service Editor.

Azure Web Apps enables you to build and host web applications in the programming language of your choice without managing infrastructure. It offers auto-scaling and high availability, supports both Windows and Linux, and enables automated deployments from GitHub, Visual Studio Team Services, or any Git repo.

Learn how to use Azure Web Apps with Microsoft quickstarts, tutorials, and samples.

Configure Continues Deployment from the Azure Portal.

Or
Continuous Deployment to Azure App Service

Developer tools from the Azure Portal with App Service Editor.

 

Azure App Services Editor

From here you can open Kudu to manage your Azure Web App and Debug via Console :

Kudu Debug console in CMD

Or Kudu Debug Console in Powershell 😉

Kudu Process Explorer

Here you find more information about Kudu for your Azure Web App on GitHub

And to come back at Microsoft Visual Studio Code, you can manage and Build your Azure Web App from here too :

Azure Web App Services in VSC

Hope this first step by step Guide is useful for you to start with Microsoft Azure Web App and Visual Studio Code to make your Pipeline.
More Information at Visual Studio Code

Azure Web Apps Overview

#GlobalAzure BootCamp Day for the Community – Microsoft #Azure Overview Info

I wish everyone around the world an Awesome Global Azure BootCamp !

Here are some Microsoft Azure links for Information :

Create your Azure Free Account Today here

Microsoft Azure Get started documentation

Microsoft Azure Technical Docs Online

Microsoft Azure SDK – Tools

Microsoft Azure Architecture Information

Microsoft Virtual Academy

Microsoft Azure Training

Microsoft Azure Self-Paced Courses on Edx

Microsoft Azure Blog site

Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Microsoft Azure on GitHub

Microsoft Azure Friday on Channel 9

Follow on Twitter :

@Azure

@AzureBackup

@AzureSupport

@AzureCosmosDB

@Scottgu

@Markrussinovich

@CoreySandersWA

#MVPBuzz

@JamesvandenBerg