How to provision an Azure AKS cluster and deploy a workload

Provisioning an Azure AKS cluster

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is Microsoft's managed Kubernetes. Azure operates the control plane at no charge; you pay for the worker nodes. The Azure CLI creates a cluster in a couple of commands and wires up monitoring and identity.

Prerequisites

• An Azure subscription with permission to create resources.
• The Azure CLI (az) and kubectl installed.

Steps

1. Sign in and set subscription

az login
az account set --subscription "<subscription-id>"

2. Create a resource group

az group create --name demo-rg --location eastus

3. Create the AKS cluster

az aks create \
  --resource-group demo-rg \
  --name demo-aks \
  --node-count 3 \
  --enable-managed-identity \
  --generate-ssh-keys

Provisioning takes several minutes.

4. Get cluster credentials

az aks get-credentials --resource-group demo-rg --name demo-aks
kubectl get nodes

5. Deploy a workload

kubectl create deployment web --image=nginx --replicas=3
kubectl expose deployment web --port=80 --type=LoadBalancer
kubectl get svc web --watch

Azure provisions a public load balancer with an external IP.

6. Enable the cluster autoscaler

az aks update \
  --resource-group demo-rg --name demo-aks \
  --enable-cluster-autoscaler --min-count 2 --max-count 6

Verification

Confirm nodes are Ready and pods Running. Browse to the load balancer's external IP and confirm the app responds. In the Azure portal, confirm the AKS resource and node pool report healthy.

Next Steps

Integrate Microsoft Entra ID for RBAC, use workload identity for pod access to Azure resources, attach Azure Container Registry for image pulls, and enable Azure Monitor for containers. Codify the cluster in Bicep or Terraform, and run az group delete --name demo-rg to clean up.