Hafslund Nett Framework using Azure Kubernetes Service

What is AKS?

AKS stands for Azure Kubernetes Service which is a service provide by Azure Cloud and managed by them.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience and enterprise-grade security and governance. Unite your development and operations teams on a single platform to rapidly build, deliver and scale applications with confidence.

Features Provided by Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

· Pay for only the nodes(VM’s) that you are using.

· Cluster Upgrades made easier.

· Integrated logging and monitoring.

· GPU enabled nodes

· Virtual network an ingress.

· Development tolling and integration.

· Make workloads portable

Because container apps are separate from their infrastructure, they become portable when you run them on Kubernetes. Move them from local machines to production among on-premises, hybrid and multiple cloud environments — all while maintaining consistency across environments.

· Scale containers easily

Define complex containerised applications and deploy them across a cluster of servers or even multiple clusters with Kubernetes. As Kubernetes scales applications according to your desired state, it automatically monitors and maintains container health.

· Build more extensible apps

A large open-source community of developers and companies actively builds extensions and plugins that add capabilities such as security, monitoring and management to Kubernetes. Plus, the Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program requires every Kubernetes version to support APIs that make it easier to use those community offerings.

Case Study : Hafslund Nett

Hafslund Nett (Hafslund) — the power grid operator that serves 1.5 million Norwegians — determined that legacy systems for reading meter data needed higher capacity and that externally developed software was difficult to manage. To address the issue, Hafslund chose to develop its own meter-system software, using Microsoft Azure as its cloud platform, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to manage software containers, and Azure Monitor for containers to optimize container performance. Hafslund IT staff will soon save time managing their improved systems, and customers will benefit from higher reliability.

Why Hafslund Nett needed to shift to Azure Cloud.

Hafslund Nett (Hafslund) owns and operates the regional power grid for more than 40 Norwegian communities in the Oslo area. The company is one of the most advanced utilities in Europe, with state-of-the-art technology to manage, monitor, and optimize operations at a reasonable price. To keep the lights on for the 1.5 million people in its coverage territory, Hafslund continually looks for modern ways to keep its IT systems highly effective.

The biggest problem was to implement needed enhancements an repairs in timely manner as it was very costly a time taking. Also, the legacy system barely has the capacity to process the large volume of IoT data coming in from the few smart meters deployed so far.

In order to overcome this challenged they decided to use contarization platform to create its smart meter software powered by efficient industry-recognized tools.

Application of containerization and Azure Kubernetes Service

By applying AKS they were able to build highly secure networking between on -premises IT resources an Azure which was a prerequisite for workloads we want to run with Kubernetes.