Siemens Healthineers using AKS by Azure Cloud

Siemens Healthineers is a worldwide healthcare technology company. Their purpose is to enable healthcare providers to increase value by empowering them on their journey towards expanding precision medicine, transforming care delivery, and improving patient experience, all enabled by digitalizing healthcare.

An estimated five million patients globally everyday benefit from their innovative technologies and services in the areas of diagnostic and therapeutic imaging, laboratory diagnostics and molecular medicine, as well as digital health and enterprise services.

There are a leading medical technology company with over 170 years of experience and 18,000 patents globally. With more than 48,000 dedicated colleagues in over 70 countries, they continue to innovate and shape the future of healthcare. Below is the network of their Company.

So, a huge company will need Fully Managed Services from Public Cloud Services, as their First Moto is to provide healthcare facilities, hence they need not to make investments for creating their own Infrastructure for their uses, Instead they will choose a Public Cloud Provider, which will take responsibility to give them support with high reliability, and availability of their resources all the time. So, Siemens Healthineers chose “Microsoft Azure” as their Public Cloud Provider.

A statement from the Company regarding Microsoft:

I think our Digital Ecosystem, and the technological advances we are making through our relationship with Microsoft, can prompt a big step forward in digitalization for the whole industry.

Carsten Spies: Head of Research and Development, Digital Ecosystem Platform, Siemens Healthineers

Another Statement is:

Internal and external developers can independently release microservices at any point in time, which makes development faster and enables a continuous delivery approach completely based on Azure. We have set an astonishing speed for product development.

Thomas Friese: Vice President, Digital Ecosystem Platform,Siemens Healthineers

So coming to the main point, Siemens Healthineers uses “Azure Kubernetes Service”, which is a fully managed Kubernetes Cluster, provided by Microsoft Azure Cloud.

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.

Features:

• Elastic provisioning of capacity without the need to manage the infrastructure and with the ability to add event-driven autoscaling and triggers through KEDA.
• Faster end-to-end development experience through Visual Studio Code Kubernetes tools, Azure DevOps and Azure Monitor.
• Advanced identity and access management using Azure Active Directory and dynamic rules enforcement across multiple clusters.
• Available in more regions than any other cloud provider.

Common uses for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Migrate your existing application to the cloud, build a complex application that uses machine learning or take advantage of the agility offered by a microservices architecture. Available in more regions than any other cloud provider.

Lift and shift to containers with AKS- Easily migrate existing application to container(s) and run within the Azure managed Kubernetes service (AKS).

Microservices with AKS- Use AKS to simplify the deployment and management of microservices based architecture. AKS streamlines horizontal scaling, self-healing, load balancing, secret management.

Secure DevOps for 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.

Bursting from AKS with ACI- 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.

Azure IoT reference architecture- This reference architecture shows a recommended architecture for IoT applications on Azure using PaaS (platform-as-a-service) components.

Machine Learning model training with AKS- 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.

Data Streaming scenario- 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.

So now lets see, How this company takes advantage of this Service AKS:

Siemens Healthineers has taken a containerized approach to application development, which means it uses virtualization at the application operating system level as opposed to launching virtual machines. The company deploys its distributed applications in Docker containers, orchestrates those containers using Kubernetes, and monitors and manages the environment with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Siemens Healthineers chose AKS because developers can quickly and easily work with their applications with minimal operations and maintenance overhead — provisioning, upgrading, and scaling resources without taking applications offline. With AKS, Siemens Healthineers can comfortably scale out its Kubernetes environment and scale back again if it doesn’t need the compute power, creating very high-density deployments on a microservices level. With a microservice-based architecture, internal and external developers can independently release microservices at any point in time, which makes development faster and enables a continuous delivery approach completely based on Azure. We have set an astonishing speed for product development.

Managing a stable runtime environment with AKS helps Siemens Healthineers realize shorter release cycles and achieve its desired continuous delivery approach. Highly regulated environments like healthcare typically require many steps to go from development to public release, but implementing a continuous delivery pipeline has simplified the process and helped Siemens Healthineers achieve the speed it wants. And when rolling out new software, the company appreciates that it doesn’t have to worry about breaking its production environment, due to AKS upgrade and failure domains — new releases get deployed smoothly to customers with zero downtime.

Using Azure Kubernetes Service puts us into a position to not only deploy their business logic in Docker containers, including the orchestration but also, through application gateway and API management, to easily manage the exposure and control and meter the access continuously. Siemens Healthineers relies on a serverless application model to expedite development, and as a result, developers have a very short path from coding to actual operation of their code.

Siemens Healthineers has brought in additional Azure capabilities that help deliver insights from data and offer the best possible tools for the healthcare industry. For example, the company has made great use of Azure Cosmos DB.

They use some other Services also, Provided by Azure Cloud, and hence a architecture is as follows:

So, as of the above describes Case Study, Siemens Healthineer uses AKS and also uses other Services for Databases, Storage, API’s and many other services, hence as a result, A great Infrastructure is deployed on Azure Cloud, and using it with full efficiency.

“I have gained all knowledge of this AKS Service under the mentorship of Mr. VIMAL DAGA Sir during the Azure Workshop, organized by Linux World India.”

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