Getting Started with Hazelcast on Azure Kubernetes Service

This blog shows you how you can install Hazelcast on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and connect to the cluster using an Hazelcast client. It assumes some familiarity with Kubernetes , Azure and Azure Cloud shell. The goal of this blog is to keep things simple and show you the steps to get up and running in a few minutes.

Here are the steps to get Hazelcast up and running on AKS.

Note the resource group and the name of the cluster that you created. You will use those to get the AKS credentials below.

Get credentials from your AKS instance

Launch the Azure cloud shell. The Azure cloud shell comes preinstalled with the az command line interface.

Run the following command in your Azure cloud shell providing the resource group and clustername that you noted above:

az aks get-credentials --resource-group HazelcastDemo --name democluster

You can now verify that you can run kubectl commands.

helm repo add hazelcast https://hazelcast.github.io/charts/

helm install my-release --set service.type=LoadBalancer,service.clusterIP="",cluster.memberCount=1 hazelcast/hazelcast

Only one Hazelcast member is instantiated to keep things simple. As you scale the number of Hazelcast instances discovery of  members in the cluster and Role Based Access Control ( RBAC )  configurations will come into play. You can find additional details here.

The screenshot below shows Hazelcast installed on the pods. If the install is successful, you should see an external-IP assigned to both the hazelcast and hazelcast-mancenter services.

Validate by Launching an External Client and Management Center

Eclipse screen showing the Java client.

Running the client and connecting to the Hazelcast cluster on Azure.