Deploying a Spring Boot REST API on Azure Kubernetes Service with Azure Database for PostgreSQL

Connecting AKS Applications to Azure PostgreSQL with AAD Pod Identities

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In this post, We will look at how to run a Java Spring Boot application on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and connects to Azure PostgreSQL using Azure AD Pod identity. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that lets you quickly deploy and manage applications based on microservices.

Azure Active Directory pod-managed identities uses Kubernetes primitives to associate managed identities for Azure resources and identities in Azure Active Directory (AAD) with pods.

What we’ll cover in this post:

• Create an AKS cluster and Pod Identity.
• Create an Azure Database for PostgreSQL server.
• Prepare Java Spring Boot application for AKS.
• Deploy Azure Container Registry (ACR).
• Deploy Java application to Kubernetes with Kustomize.

The following diagram shows the architecture of the above steps:

Architecture diagram by Yi Ai

AKS cluster and POD Identity

I will assume you already have an Azure Subscription setup.

Before going any further, we will need to register EnablePodIdentityPreview and install aks-preview Azure CLI extension.

Let’s create a resource group and an AKS cluster with Azure CNI and pod-managed identity enabled.