Creating an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Cluster- Step by Step

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a fully managed container orchestration service available in Azure. With AKS, users can deploy and manage containerized applications with built-in support for popular tools and frameworks, such as Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and more.

AKS offers a number of features, including automatic scaling, high availability, and automated security updates. It also integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure Active Directory, Azure DevOps, and Azure Monitor, making it easy to incorporate AKS into existing workflows and environments.

Here, I have outlined the fundamental steps to create an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster:

Step 1- Log in to the Azure Portal: Go to the Azure Portal (https://portal.azure.com/) and navigate to search box to find Kubernetes.

Step 2- Fill in the basics such as subscription name, resource group, cluster preset configuration, Kubernetes cluster configuration and Kubernetes cluster name.

Continue to furnish details on the fields for Region, Availability zone and so on including the node size, scale method and node count range. Here, node count range is the minimum and maximum node count for this node pool.

Step 3- Next, head over to ‘Node pools’ tab and select the defaults for node pools and node pools disk encryption. As said, all AKS disks at rest are encrypted at rest with Microsoft managed keys. You may choose to go with customer managed key depending upon specific customer requirement.

Step 4- In the ‘Access’ tab, we can go with defaults for Resource Identity as well as Authentication and Authorization-

Step 5- In the ‘Networking tab’, we may choose default network configuration for the cluster, such as Azure Vnet with default or custom settings. Select ‘Kubenet’ to create Vnet with default settings.

Step 6- In the ‘Integration’ tab, note that AKS integrates so well with several Azure services. First, it integrates with Microsoft Defender for Cloud for unified security management and advanced threat protection across hybrid cloud workloads. It also connects to Azure Container Registry to enable seamless deployments from a private image registry. Beyond that, AKS connects to Azure Monitor and Azure Policy for seamless management and governance controls.

Step 7- In the ‘Advanced’ tab, we can notice that AKS also integrates to Azure Key Vaults to store secrets. Also, a new resource group will be created to store all infrastructure resources associated to the cluster (note the default RG name- MC_AKS-RG_aks-cluster-merocloud_southeastasia with option to customize.).

Now, hit ‘Review+ Create’.

Step 8- Now, that the validation has passed, hit ‘Create’ to initiate AKS deployment.

Step 9- As we can see that the cluster is deployed now, we can connect to it using the Azure CLI or the Kubernetes command-line tool, kubectl.

That’s it! The fully functional AKS cluster is now running. We can finally deploy applications to the cluster. We can deploy apps to the AKS cluster using YAML configuration files or the Kubernetes command-line interface (CLI).