Azure Kubernetes Service - AKS

Explore how Azure Kubernetes Service provides a managed, regionally available Kubernetes as a service that abstracts complexity, enables integration with Azure Active Directory, self-healing clusters, and automation tools.

Understand AKS pricing by exploring free control-plane, noting that you pay for node VMs, disks, bandwidth, and storage volumes, standard load balancers, IP addresses, log analytics, and SLA options.

Discover why you might choose managed Kubernetes services, including certified distributions and simple cluster management. These services reduce operational complexity with an abstraction layer for security and high availability.

Explore how managed Kubernetes services like Azure Kubernetes Service simplify getting started with Kubernetes by automating scaling, providing multi-master high-availability control planes, and abstracting complex infrastructure.

Compare managed and self-managed Kubernetes, balancing complexity and customization with AKS and other providers. Evaluate tightly coupled installers like aks-engine and Kops, and loosely coupled tools such as Kubespray.

Learn how to check AKS availability by region, expand regions, and verify that your chosen region supports AKS and necessary features to plan your infrastructure.

When creating an AKS cluster, some virtual machine sizes are restricted; only smallest sizes are allowed because AKS requires minimal hardware capacity to operate, with alternatives for lightweight Kubernetes solutions.

Learn how AKS creates a node resource group and propagates cluster tags to it, while managing resource groups and understanding the automatic tags on virtual machines, load balancers, disks.

Learn how Kubernetes releases occur roughly every three months, why AKS may not have the latest version, and how upgrades are possible but downgrades are not.

Understand resource group limits for AKS deployments, including the default limit of 800 and the exception list for disks, snapshots, backups, Microsoft Container Registry, and DNS zones.

Compare Kubenet and Azure CNI in AKS, weighing IP efficiency, pod and node IP usage, policy support, and load balancer options to choose the right CNI for your cluster.

Compare basic and standard load balancers for AKS, noting the sku is fixed at cluster creation, basic is free with limited outbound ip configuration, standard offers sla and higher limits.

Ensure AKS CIDRs do not overlap with CIDRs, including VNET peering or on-prem connections. CIDRs cannot be changed after cluster creation; plan Azure CNI IP usage to avoid exhaustion.

Explore how AKS with a Basic external load balancer and dynamic outbound IP handles pod traffic, noting no load balancer is created initially and the outbound IP is dynamic.

Provision a basic external load balancer in AKS and achieve a static outbound IP. The first load balancer service determines the outbound IP from the front-end IP configuration.

Create an AKS cluster with a standard external load balancer to automatically provision a static public IP and configure outbound rules using that IP as the outbound IP.

Create an AKS cluster with the standard load balancer and outbound rule, provisioning a static public outbound IP, then test outbound connectivity with netcat and telnet.

Examine how AKS exposes a pod app to the internet by creating a deployment and a load-balancer service mapping container port 8080 to port 80 with a public static IP.

Enable AKS's http application routing add-on for testing, create a DNS zone and static IP, and expose a Kubernetes deployment via a subdomain ingress to a cluster IP service.

Azure Kubernetes Service - AKS demonstrates ingress from internal network by deploying an nginx container on port 8080 and exposing port 80 via a LoadBalancer service with the azure-load-balancer-internal annotation.

Plan your AKS cluster creation by understanding what you can change after launch—AAD integration, service principals, upgrades—versus what you cannot change, such as networking, private clusters, and VM sizes.

Compare azure portal and azure cli for aks cluster creation, showing portal ease with limited customization and cli's full parameter control, automation, and networking options like kubenet or azure cni.

Create an aks cluster in the Azure portal by configuring subscription, resource group, name, region, Kubernetes version, node size and count, and enabling rbac with a service principal.

Learn to create an aks cluster with Azure CLI using a manually created service principal, assign owner access to your VNet, and configure options like network plugin and ssh keys.

Learn how get-credentials with or without admin yields the same certificate and kubeconfig for all users, then explore securing AKS by restricting Azure roles or integrating with Azure Active Directory.

Generate kubeconfig files for admin and regular AKS users using Azure CLI, then inspect Kubernetes control plane logs via diagnostic settings and log analytics.

Explore the integration architecture of an Azure Kubernetes Service cluster integrated with Azure Active Directory, featuring two app registrations—server and client—for authenticating AKS and kubectl.

Register and configure a server application in Azure Active Directory to authenticate AKS, update the manifest, create a client secret, grant directory and user permissions, and expose an API scope.

Register a new client application to integrate AKS with Azure Active Directory, set a web redirect URI, then configure permissions and save the application and directory IDs.

Integrate Azure Active Directory with AKS, create server and client app registrations, and implement Kubernetes RBAC with AAD groups.