Azure Kubernetes Service(AKS) and How it is benefited to the PaisaBazaar.com.
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Kubernetes, a container orchestration system — a way to manage the lifecycle of containerized applications across an entire fleet. It’s a sort of meta-process that grants the ability to automate the deployment and scaling of several containers at once. Several containers running the same application are grouped together. These containers act as replicas, and serve to load balance incoming requests. A container orchestrator, then, supervises these groups, ensuring that they are operating correctly.
Azure Kubernetes Service:-
Deploy and manage containerised applications more easily with a fully managed Kubernetes service. 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.
Easily define, deploy, debug and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes applications and automatically containerise your applications. Use modern application development to accelerate time to market.
Add a full CI/CD pipeline to your AKS clusters with automated routine tasks and set up a canary deployment strategy in just a few clicks. Detect failures early and optimise your pipelines with deep traceability into your deployments.
Common uses for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS):-
- DevOps and Kubernetes are better together. Implementing secure DevOps together with Kubernetes on Azure, you can achieve the balance between speed and security and deliver code faster at scale.
- Use AKS to easily ingest & process a real-time data stream with millions of data points collected via sensors. Perform fast analysis and computations to develop insights into complex scenarios quickly.
- Training of models using large datasets is a complex and resource intensive task. Use familiar tools such as TensorFlow and Kubeflow to simplify training of Machine Learning models.
- Use the AKS virtual node to provision pods inside ACI that start in seconds. This enables AKS to run with just enough capacity for your average workload.
- Use AKS to simplify the deployment and management of microservices based architecture. AKS streamlines horizontal scaling, self-healing, load balancing, secret management.
How AKS is benefited to the PaisaBazaar.com.
Paisabazaar was already in the process of digitizing lending processes when COVID-19 hit India. The pandemic accelerated the company’s endeavor to digitally replicate its end-to-end lending process to create a seamless remote experience for both customers and lenders. The company was able to achieve this through the creation of a digital stack — Paisabazaar Stack — that disburses loans and issues credit cards using Microsoft Azure, AI Builder, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
The company had been trying to create a digital ecosystem for lending partners, banks, and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs). But when COVID-19 struck, digitization became a critical need as physical contact was limited. As a technology-driven fintech firm, Paisabazaaar started to digitally recreate the fundamental process of lending, encompassing the complete end-to-end value chain, through a stack. Microsoft was the preferred choice for this project as Paisabazaar had been using Azure for two years and believed in the capabilities of Microsoft products to empower organizations through technology infrastructure.
Chance of Approval is a feature Paisabazaar developed long before COVID-19, using Azure Kubernetes Service. It enables the company to use a predictive algorithm model to provide customized lending solutions. It matches factors from a customer’s profile, such as income, credit score, or age, with the various lending criteria of different lenders, and shows the customer the odds of getting the application approved.
The company now offers its entire end-to-end digitization stack to banks and NBFCs on its platform. In the fourth quarter of 2020, the company is working to get back to pre-COVID business numbers. The responses from customers, as well as partners, has been overwhelming.