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Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Deploy and scale containerised applications with managed Kubernetes on Azure.
0Free-Limited
Container Orchestration Cloud Platform Managed Kubernetes
Overview
AKS is a managed Kubernetes service by Microsoft Azure that simplifies deploying a production-grade Kubernetes cluster.
Key Features
- Managed Kubernetes control plane — free, Azure manages upgrades and patching
- Azure Active Directory integration for RBAC and workload identity
- Virtual Nodes using Azure Container Instances for serverless burst scaling
- Azure Monitor and Container Insights for built-in observability
- GitOps-enabled clusters with Flux extension from Azure Arc
- Confidential computing nodes for sensitive workloads
Real-World Workflows
Deploying a .NET microservice to AKS with Azure DevOps
- 1Provision AKS with Terraform, connecting it to Azure Container Registry
- 2Azure DevOps pipeline builds the image and pushes it to ACR
- 3Helm chart is applied to AKS using the kubectl task in Azure Pipelines
- 4Azure Key Vault secrets are mounted in pods using the CSI driver
- 5Azure Monitor alerts notify on pod restarts and CPU throttling
AKS with GitOps via Flux
- 1Enable the Flux GitOps extension on the AKS cluster from the Azure portal
- 2Connect Flux to a Git repository containing Kubernetes manifests
- 3Any commit to the repo is reconciled to the cluster automatically
- 4Use Azure Policy to enforce Kubernetes admission controls cluster-wide
Getting Started
az group create --name myRG --location eastus az aks create --resource-group myRG \ --name myAKSCluster --node-count 2 --generate-ssh-keys az aks get-credentials --resource-group myRG --name myAKSCluster
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