OS Virtualization

Kubernetes vs Service Fabric

April 13, 2018 Application Virtualization, Azure, Emerging Technologies, Kubernates, Orchestrator, OS Virtualization, PaaS, Service Fabric, Virtual Machines, Virtualization No comments

What is the difference between Kubernates and Service Fabric?

It is a common question today among most of the business stakeholders, infrastructure specialists, and information technology architects.

To answer in simpler words, quoting from this Reddit log :

Kubernetes manage/orchestrate containers and applications within.

ServiceFabric is a framework for microservices based on one of three models; stateful, stateless, actor. Service Fabric provides a framework for creating micro services, runtime for managing distributed instances, and also provides the ‘fabric’ that holds everything together.

A detailed comparison quoting from an MSDN blog from here:

Azure Container Service: If you are looking to deploy your application in Linux environment and are comfortable with an orchestrator such as Swarm, Kubernetes or DC/OS, use ACS. A typical 3 tier application (such as a web front end, a caching layer, a API layer and a database layer) can be easily container-ized with 1 single dockerfile (or docker-compose file). It can be continuously decomposed into smaller services gradually. This approach provides an immediate benefit of portability of such an application. Containers is Open technology and there is great community support around containers.

Azure Service Fabric: If an application must have its state saved locally, then use Service Fabric. It is also a good choice if you are looking to deploy the application in Windows server ecosystem(Linux support is in the works as well!). Refer to common workloads on Service Fabric for more discussion on applications that can benefit from Service Fabric. Biggest benefit is that Service Fabric applications can run on-premise, on Azure or even in other cloud platforms also.

What’s Azure Container Service (ACS/AKS)

April 12, 2018 Application Virtualization, Azure, Azure Container Service, Cloud Computing, Cloud Services, Computing, Containers, Docker, Emerging Technologies, IaaS, Kubernates, Microsoft, OpenSource, Orchestrator, OS Virtualization, PaaS, Virtual Machines, Virtualization, Windows Azure Development No comments

I will start with history: Sometime around 2016, Microsoft launched an IaaS service called Azure Container Service a.k.an ACS serves as a bridge between Azure Ecosystem and existing container ecosystem being used widely by the developer community around the world.

It helps as a gateway for infrastructure engineers and developers to manage underlying infrastructure such as Virtual Machines, Storage, Network Load Balancing services individually than the application itself. The application developer doesn’t have to worry about planet-scale of the application, instead, a container orchestrator can manage the scale up and scale down of your application environment based on peaks and downs of your application usage.

It offers an option to select from 3 major container orchestrators available today such as DC/OS, Swarm, Docker, and Kubernates. ACS along with your choice of container orchestrators works efficiently with different container ecosystems to enable the promise of application virtualization.

To make it simpler, ACS is your Super Glue to gel your Azure infrastructure and your container orchestrator together. Means you will be able to make your fully managed container cluster in a matter of minutes with Azure.

ACS is for making your microservices dream come true, by providing individual services scale according to the demand and automatically reduce the scale, if usage is low. You don’t have to worry, ACS and your container orchestrator will take care of you.

If you are a beginner to container-based infrastructure for your applications, you don’t have to take the pain at all of setting up Kubernates on your own, instead, ACS will simplify your implementation with a couple of easier click thru’s and your container infrastructure is ready to be fully managed by you. As simple as that.

What is Azure Container Kubernates Service (AKS) then?

As I am writing today, Microsoft has a new fully managed PaaS service called as Azure Container Service (AKS) or Managed Kubernates, meaning that Kubernates would be your default fully managed container orchestrator, if you choose Azure Container Service. But you would be able to deploy other open-source container orchestrators if you prefer to choose to have your own unmanaged Kubernates, Docker or DC/OS and then add your specific management and monitoring tools.

This service is currently available in PUBLIC PREVIEW, you can get started from here

Means though it is a fully managed service, you still have the option to manage it your own using your preferred set of tools and orchestrators.

Charging Model

Whether you manage your AKS service with your own set of tools and orchestrator or you use Fully Managed Kubernates, you only need to pay for resources you consume. No need to worry about per-cluster charges like other providers.

Useful References:

Installing Windows 10 Client Hyper-V in VMware Workstation/Fusion/ESX

July 10, 2015 Hyper-V, KnowledgeBase, Microsoft, OS Virtualization, Tips & Tricks, Virtual Machines, Virtualization, VMware, Windows, Windows 10 No comments ESX, Fusion, Hyper-V, VMware, VMWare Workstation

As a Windows 10 Insider, I would always latest version of Windows on VMWare Player, Workstation or VirtualBox. Recently I was trying to set up a Windows Phone 10/UWP development environment inside a VMWare virtual machine.

I tried to enable Hyper-V platform components in my Windows 10 Preview Virtual machine. It shows an error.

Hyper-V cannot be installed: A hypervisor is already running

Unable to use Hyper-V platform inside a Windows 10 virtual machine
When trying to enable/install Hyper-V in a Windows 10 virtual machine, you will see the above error:

SOLUTION:

Solution for this problem is to edit your VMware Virtual Machine configuration(.vmx) file in your Windows 10 Virtual machine stored location.

Switch off/Shutdown your VMware virtual machine
Edit the corresponding .vmx file
Append the following entries to the vmx file (verify entry if already exists)

hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE”
vhv.enable = "TRUE"
mce.enable = "TRUE"

Save the changes
Start your Windows 8 VMware Virtual machine
Now go to Control Panel –> ‘Programs and Features’ –> Turn windows features on or off
Viola!, You can now enable ‘Hyper-V Platform’ . Now you can install Windows Phone SDK on your Windows 10 Virtual Machine