AZ-900 Practice Question 16: Container Orchestration
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) · Test 2 · question 6 of 10
A team has packaged a microservices application into containers. They need Azure to schedule those containers across a pool of nodes, restart any container that crashes, and change the number of replicas as load moves, without the team writing that orchestration themselves. Which service should they choose?
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Answer:
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed Kubernetes service for deploying and managing containerized applications. Azure creates and runs the Kubernetes control plane for you, and Kubernetes itself provides exactly the behaviour described: scheduling pods onto nodes, restarting failed containers, and horizontal scaling. Microsoft lists microservices with streamlined horizontal scaling, self-healing, and load balancing as a primary AKS use case.
Option A, Azure Container Registry, is a private registry that stores and distributes container *images*; it is where AKS pulls from, but it never runs a container. Option B, Azure Container Instances, is the fastest way to run isolated containers "without having to manage any virtual machines and without having to adopt a higher-level service"; that lack of an orchestrator is precisely what makes it the wrong fit for cluster-wide scheduling and self-healing. Option D gives the team containers but leaves them to build and operate the orchestration layer by hand, which is what the stem rules out, and they would own the guest OS as well.
Reference: What is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?