Azure Advent Calendar 2019

This December two Azure MVPs, Gregor Suttie and Richard Hooper are running a fantastic initiative called the Azure Advent Calendar. Every day in December you will see 3 Azure focussed videos from MVP’s, Microsoft Employees and other community members posted to this YouTube Channel. There is some fantastic content posted there, so I highly recommend you check it out. There is content for those new to Azure, all the way through to the expert level.

Today, the 10th of December is my turn. My video focusses on using “Virtual Nodes” with Azure Kubernetes services.

In this video, I’m taking a look at how you can combine two Azure container platforms - Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Container Instances (ACI). Virtual Node lets you hook up ACI to your AKS instance. ACI pretends to be just another node in your Kubernetes cluster, but you get the benefit of being able to use the massive scale of ACI to create your containers without having to worry about adding more VM’s into your cluster.

Virtual Node is an excellent solution for scenarios where you have very unpredictable or burst workloads on your AKS cluster, and you want to know you can handle this load when you need it. Because ACI billing is per second, you have access to this massive scale, but only pay for it when you need it.

In this video, we take a look at how Virtual Nodes work and how to set them up. Then to demo this, we play with another great project called KEDA, which allows us to create event-driven workloads in AKS, which can scale on-demand, a perfect workload for Virtual Nodes.

I hope you enjoy this video, and if you have any questions, feel free to post there here or on YouTube. Do check out all the other videos (75 by the end of December), as there is a wealth of great Azure information here.

Most importantly, Merry Christmas!