Introduction

In mid 2024, Kubernetes reached an incredible milestone - it’s tenth birthday . In the ten years since its launch, it’s gone from being an interesting experiment for running scalable workloads, to building on top of other open source technologies such as Docker and containerd to become a ubiquitous platform for hosting containerised apps.

These days, Kubernetes is a well-established and mature platform, with a consistent release cadence of three updates per year. It is widely regarded as a reliable solution, and many enterprises around the world — including Microsoft — depend on it to run their most critical workloads. Key Microsoft services such as Office 365, Xbox Online, and Teams are built on Kubernetes. Increasingly, our customers are looking to adopt the same approach.

Kubernetes is highly attractive to customers largely due to its portability. Being largely infrastructure-agnostic, it allows workloads to move seamlessly between hosting environments — including cloud providers and on-premises data centres — with minimal configuration changes. This flexibility gives customers greater control over when, where, and how they run their Kubernetes workloads.

Despite its strengths, deploying and managing “vanilla” Kubernetes remains complex and time-consuming. This has led many cloud providers to develop managed Kubernetes services — such as our own Azure Kubernetes Service . AKS simplifies cluster deployment and significantly reduces the operational overhead, making it quicker and easier for customers to adopt Kubernetes at scale.

However, much of our learning material focuses on the ‘happy path’ of deploying simple demo applications. While it’s important to show customers how quickly and easily they can get started with Kubernetes, it’s not in their best interest to downplay the complexities of operating Kubernetes clusters—especially when running production workloads.

The goal of this workshop, therefore, is to provide hands-on experience not only with deploying sample apps via the ‘happy path’, but also with understanding and addressing some of the ‘Day 2 Operations’ challenges involved in managing and maintaining Kubernetes clusters with AKS.

This workshop is hosted in GitHub , and we welcome feedback via issues or pull requests so that we can continuously improve the content!