Announcing the AKS Health Check

by Natalie Reinford, Facundo Gauna | Wednesday, Aug 4, 2021 | Azure Kubernetes Open-Source

As we continue to work with more clients and different types of organizations, we continue to see a trend - the lack of time. Organizations are often racing to get a project “live” or struggle to keep up with the demand of infrastructure deployments across the enterprise. The same is true for Kubernetes. And with this rush, organizations don't have the time to become familiar with the vast amount of documentation and recommended best practices.

To help solve this problem, we iterated on ways to help organizations quickly understand if they had a significant gap in configuration, security, reliability with their Kubernetes clusters on Azure.

The AKS Health Check

We want to help organizations stay updated with best practices while identifying high, medium, and low priority risks with a minimal time commitment. The health check is a short, value-packed technical assessment of an AKS cluster. It provides a complete view of the areas that may require attention, highlighting the most important ones.

We check for Microsoft best practices ranging across different topics. They include:

• Development
• Image Management
• Cluster Setup
• Disaster Recovery
• Storage
• Networking
• Cluster Maintenance

We deliver this engagement through two parts. First, we take an offline look at an AKS cluster's technical configuration. Secondly, we discuss with essential technical leads that provide contextual and anecdotal information. The best part: we don't need access to the environment. We created a Docker container containing an assessment tool that performs these checks on our behalf to perform the technical assessment.

Now Open-Source

We chose to open-source our material so that you can perform the assessment yourself. We realized that our value is in our experience and opinion, not the tools.

You can find the project here: https://github.com/boxboat/aks-health-check

The repository has:

• A tool that automates some of the checks.
• The document that we use to keep track of the assessment results along with additional resources to mitigate issues.

Who's a good fit?

This engagement was created for organizations that are currently running AKS clusters. Here's some scenarios where it makes sense:

• You are going live to production soon with a new AKS cluster. You want to avoid surprises in the future.
• You have high compliance requirements, and you need an extra set of eyes.
• Your organization rushed to deploy a cluster quickly, and you have questions about how they did it.
• You are making significant investments into building a Kubernetes platform, and you would love the extra assurance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will you need access to our environment?

No. Half of the checks are relatively technical and would typically need access to the cluster. However, we created an open-source tool that performs these checks on our behalf. Someone in your team with access to the cluster can run the container from their workstation and pass the results to our consultant.

Is this free?

Yes, the material is open-source. If you would like us to perform this assessment in your behalf, fill out the form at the bottom.

About BoxBoat

BoxBoat is a Microsoft Gold Partner and a Preferred Azure Kubernetes Service Partner. BoxBoat specializes in helping organizations adopt Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) as a key component of their cloud strategy. Our team of experts enables those that are starting fresh on their AKS journey, as well as those that have already taken the plunge and are looking to continuously improve their application deployment strategy.