AKS or Azure Kubernetes Service is a managed Kubernetes service by Azure. It helps developers to focus on development and let Azure take care of providing Kuebernets and in turn manage containers.
Before getting into AKS, Azure also provides Azure Container Instance to create and manage containers individually.
Azure Container Instances offers the fastest and simplest way to run a container in Azure, without having to manage any virtual machines and without having to adopt a higher-level service. Azure Container Instances is a great solution for any scenario that can operate in isolated containers, including simple applications, task automation, and build jobs.
AKS Terminology
- Pools are groups of nodes with identical configurations.
- Nodes are individual virtual machines running containerized applications.
- Pods are a single instance of an application. A pod can contain multiple containers.
- Container is a lightweight and portable executable image that contains software and all of its dependencies.
- Deployment has one or more identical pods managed by Kubernetes.
- Manifest is the YAML file describing a deployment.
The kubelet is the Kubernetes agent that processes the orchestration requests from the Azure-managed node, and scheduling of running the requested containers.
Virtual networking is handled by the kube-proxy on each node. The proxy routes network traffic and manages IP addressing for services and pods.
The container runtime is the component that allows containerized applications to run and interact with additional resources such as the virtual network and storage.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/configure-azure-kubernetes-service/3-kubernetes-clusters