In a previous post, I showed you how to create a Kubernetes Cluster, on Azure Container Service (Considered an IaaS offering, since you manage all the resources) and as you could see , it was pretty straightforward.

Today I will walk you through a new service on Azure called Managed Kubernetes or AKS, and this is even easier.

K8s on ACS vs AKS

So the question is, what’s the difference between Kubernetes on Azure Container Service and Manage Kubernetes or AKS?

As the following images sums it up, in AKS, the Control Plane nodes are managed for you, where in K8s on Azure Container Service, you are responsible for managing the control plane VMs.

Creating a Resource Group

So the first step to create a Kubernetes Cluster in AKS is to create a resource group. Note that, AKS is currently only available in Central US, East US and West Europe, so make sure you create your resource group in one of these regions.

I tend to like the cloud console on Azure portal. So you can open the cloud console and use the following command to create the Resource Group.

az group create -l eastus -n aks-cluster-rg

Creating the Kubernetes Cluster

Now that your Resource Groups is created, you can use the following command to create the Kubernetes Cluster:

az aks create -n aks-cluster -g aks-cluster-rg — generate-ssh-key

Note: If you have tried to do this through the UI, you realize tat getting an “ssh key” is a painful process on its own, so I would stick to the cloud console!

So at this point your console should look like the following picture: