Azure AKS — Introduction

Welcome to the Azure AKS Tutorial

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is Microsoft’s managed Kubernetes offering. AKS simplifies deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications using Kubernetes on Azure. Microsoft manages the control plane — you pay only for the worker nodes.

What is AKS?

AKS provides:

• Free managed control plane — Microsoft manages the API server, etcd, scheduler, and controller manager at no cost
• Integrated Azure services — Azure AD, Azure Monitor, Azure Container Registry (ACR), Azure Policy
• Multiple node pool types — System and user node pools, Spot VMs, GPU nodes
• Automatic upgrades — Patch and minor version auto-upgrade channels
• Virtual nodes — Burst to Azure Container Instances (ACI) for serverless scaling

AKS Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│            Azure Managed Control Plane       │
│   (API Server, etcd, Scheduler, Controllers)│
│          ── FREE, managed by Microsoft ──    │
└─────────────────┬───────────────────────────┘
                  │
    ┌─────────────┼─────────────┐
    │             │             │
┌───┴───┐   ┌───┴───┐   ┌───┴───┐
│Node 1 │   │Node 2 │   │Node 3 │
│(VM)   │   │(VM)   │   │(Spot) │
│kubelet│   │kubelet│   │kubelet│
│Pods   │   │Pods   │   │Pods   │
└───────┘   └───────┘   └───────┘
    ↑                       ↑
  System Pool          User Pool

Prerequisites

Before starting this tutorial, you should have:

• An Azure account (create a free account)
• Azure CLI installed (az command)
• kubectl installed
• Completed the Kubernetes Foundation Tutorial or equivalent experience

Installing Azure CLI

# macOS
brew install azure-cli

# Linux (Ubuntu/Debian)
curl -sL https://aka.ms/InstallAzureCLIDeb | sudo bash

# Verify
az version
az login

What You’ll Learn

In this tutorial series, you’ll learn to:

1. Create and manage AKS clusters using Azure CLI
2. Configure Azure CNI networking and load balancers
3. Use Azure Disks and Azure Files for persistent storage
4. Integrate Azure AD for authentication and RBAC
5. Monitor clusters with Azure Monitor and Container Insights
6. Scale clusters with cluster autoscaler and virtual nodes
7. Set up CI/CD pipelines with Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions

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Practice Questions

Q1: What components does Microsoft manage in AKS?

Show Answer

Microsoft manages the **entire control plane**: - API Server - etcd - kube-scheduler - kube-controller-manager You manage the **worker nodes** (VMs in node pools). The control plane is provided at no cost — you only pay for the VM compute in your node pools.

Q2: What is the difference between a system node pool and a user node pool?

Show Answer

- **System node pool** — Runs critical system Pods (CoreDNS, metrics-server, kube-proxy). Every AKS cluster must have at least one system node pool. Minimum 2 nodes recommended for production. - **User node pool** — Runs your application workloads. Optional, can be added/removed as needed. Supports Spot VMs for cost savings.

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AKS Overview ← Next: Creating an AKS Cluster →