Azure Kubernetes Service: A Complete Guide

For platform teams operating within the Azure ecosystem, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is often the obvious choice. It delivers a fully managed, production-grade Kubernetes environment, handling control plane operations like patching, scaling, and health monitoring—with zero control plane cost. This removes much of the operational overhead and helps deploy Kubernetes workloads without deep cluster administration expertise.

But the simplicity of AKS begins to break down at scale. As you move toward multi-cluster or multi-cloud architectures, you encounter new challenges: fragmented tooling, inconsistent security policies, diverging deployment pipelines, and a lack of centralized visibility.

This guide will walk through the core advantages of AKS, while also tackling the operational complexity of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters. We'll explore how platform teams can maintain consistency, security, and automation across environments, without sacrificing the velocity and resilience that Kubernetes promises.

Key takeaways:

• Leverage the managed control plane for operational efficiency: AKS handles the complexity of the Kubernetes control plane at no cost, freeing your team to focus on application delivery. Its deep integration with native Azure services provides a strong foundation for security and monitoring within a single cloud environment.
• Implement a layered security strategy for your workloads: While Azure secures the infrastructure, you're responsible for securing everything inside the cluster. Enforce the principle of least privilege with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), isolate traffic with network policies, and integrate container scanning into your CI/CD pipeline to protect your applications.
• Standardize fleet management to overcome multi-cluster complexity: Managing multiple AKS clusters, or AKS alongside EKS and GKE, creates operational friction and inconsistent configurations. A unified platform like Plural allows you to apply consistent GitOps workflows, security policies, and observability across your entire fleet from a single control plane.

What is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?

AKS is Microsoft’s managed Kubernetes offering, designed to simplify the deployment and operation of containerized workloads at scale. Built on upstream Kubernetes, AKS offloads the heavy lifting of cluster management, including control plane provisioning, patching, scaling, and health monitoring, so engineering teams can focus on building and shipping applications instead of managing infrastructure.

Unlike self-managed clusters, AKS provides a production-ready environment with built-in integrations for Azure services like Azure Monitor, Azure Active Directory (AAD), and Azure Policy. The control plane is fully managed and offered at no cost, making it an attractive starting point for teams already invested in the Azure ecosystem.

For platform teams, AKS offers a scalable foundation for Kubernetes-native development. But managing multiple AKS clusters, or adopting a multi-cloud or hybrid approach with services like EKS (AWS) or GKE (Google Cloud) is difficult. Each platform comes with its own CLI, dashboards, IAM model, and deployment pipeline, resulting in inconsistent workflows and fragmented visibility.

To address this, a unified management layer becomes essential. Tools like Plural provide a single control plane to manage application deployments, infrastructure as code, observability, and access control across your entire Kubernetes fleet. Whether you're running AKS, EKS, or GKE, Plural helps you standardize operations, enforce security policies, and simplify Day 2 management—all from one dashboard.

Understand the Core Components and Architecture

The power of AKS comes from its managed architecture, which abstracts away the operational burden of running a Kubernetes control plane.

Microsoft manages the control plane for you, handling high availability, patching, upgrades, and security at no additional cost. You only pay for the worker nodes (Azure VMs) that run your applications.

AKS architecture is divided into two main components:

The Control Plane (Managed by Azure)

Azure hosts and manages all critical Kubernetes control plane components:

• kube-apiserver: Entry point for all Kubernetes commands and API requests
• etcd: Key-value store for cluster state and configuration
• kube-scheduler: Assigns pods to nodes based on resource needs and constraints
• kube-controller-manager: Maintains the desired state (replicas, nodes, endpoints, etc.)

Azure ensures:

• Automatic patching and upgrades
• High availability in supported regions and zones
• No direct infrastructure access needed

Because you don’t pay for the control plane, AKS is one of the more cost-effective managed Kubernetes options.

Nodes and Node Pools (Managed by You)

These are the Azure VMs where your containers actually run. AKS simplifies their provisioning and lifecycle management:

• Node Pools group VMs by configuration (e.g., size, OS, GPU support)
• You can run multiple node pools for different workload types (e.g., spot instances for batch jobs, GPU nodes for ML)

You're responsible for:

• Choosing VM sizes
• Scaling (manual or auto)
• Managing OS upgrades (optional auto-upgrade support available)

This split architecture gives you the flexibility to scale workloads as needed, while offloading the complexity of running Kubernetes itself.

See How AKS Integrates with the Kubernetes Ecosystem

AKS is a certified, upstream Kubernetes distribution, not a proprietary fork. This means any standard Kubernetes workload, Helm chart, or kubectl plugin will work out of the box. If it runs on Kubernetes, it runs on AKS.

What sets AKS apart is its deep integration with Azure-native services, which gives platform teams a tightly integrated experience for security, observability, and policy enforcement, without needing to stitch together third-party tools.

Key Azure Integrations for AKS

• Azure Active Directory (AAD)
  Tie Kubernetes RBAC directly to your existing AAD users and groups. You can grant granular permissions using native Kubernetes roles while reusing your enterprise identity system—no need to manage separate service accounts or credentials.
• Azure Monitor for Containers
  Get full-stack observability out of the box:
  • Collect pod- and node-level metrics
  • Monitor cluster health and resource usage
  • Visualize telemetry through Azure dashboards
• Azure Policy for Kubernetes
  Enforce governance rules. These policies are applied at scale across clusters, automatically and continuously.
  • Blocking privileged containers
  • Restricting resource creation by region or VM type
  • Enforcing labels or annotations for cost tracking

Why Use AKS? Key Features and Benefits

AKS is ideal for teams that want the benefits of Kubernetes without taking on the operational burden of managing it themselves. It eliminates much of the routine maintenance (like patching, scaling, and securing the control plane) so platform teams can focus on deploying applications and enabling developers.

Here’s how AKS simplifies operations and supports scale.

Simplify Operations with a Managed Control Plane

AKS offers a fully managed Kubernetes control plane, free of charge. Azure takes care of availability, upgrades, patching, and security for core components like the API server and etcd.

You only manage and pay for the worker nodes where your containers run.

This removes the need to manually bootstrap clusters, configure TLS, or manage control plane scaling. While this works well for individual clusters, managing a fleet of clusters introduces new operational challenges.

This is where Plural comes in. It extends Kubernetes lifecycle management across clusters, handling deployments, configuration, and observability through a GitOps-based workflow. With a single dashboard and API, you can manage multiple AKS clusters consistently.

Scale Effortlessly with Built-In Autoscaling

AKS includes support for key autoscaling mechanisms:

• Cluster Autoscaler adjusts node counts based on pending workloads.
• Horizontal Pod Autoscaler scales pods based on resource usage.
• Virtual Nodes (via Azure Container Instances) let you burst workloads without provisioning new VMs.

This enables your infrastructure to handle traffic spikes automatically and scale down to save costs.

With Plural, you can define autoscaling policies as code, apply them across environments, and ensure they remain consistent through version-controlled deployments.

Leverage Azure’s Security and Ecosystem Integrations

AKS integrates tightly with Azure’s native security and governance tools:

• Azure AD for role-based access control and SSO
• Azure Policy to enforce compliance at scale
• Microsoft Defender for runtime protection and threat detection

These tools make it easier to meet compliance standards like SOC 2, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA using existing enterprise infrastructure.

Plural complements these capabilities by managing RBAC and policy enforcement across clusters. For example, you can define access rules using Azure AD groups and apply them across all AKS clusters from a single management layer.

How AKS Simplifies Container Orchestration

AKS abstracts away much of the operational complexity of running Kubernetes, allowing engineering teams to focus more on application development and less on infrastructure management. It achieves this by automating critical tasks, streamlining cluster operations, and integrating essential tools directly into the platform. This managed approach helps reduce the potential for manual error and lowers the barrier to entry for adopting containerized workloads.

Automate Deployments and Updates

One of the most significant advantages of AKS is that it provides a managed control plane at no cost. Azure handles the patching, scaling, and availability of core Kubernetes components like the API server and etcd, relieving your team of a substantial operational burden. This means you no longer need to manually perform complex and risky version upgrades on the cluster’s brain.

While AKS automates control plane updates, you still need a robust strategy for your own applications. Plural’s GitOps-based Continuous Deployment engine extends this automation to your workloads, creating a consistent and repeatable process for deploying applications across your entire AKS fleet.

Streamline Cluster Management

AKS makes it simple to provision a new Kubernetes cluster through the Azure portal, CLI, or infrastructure-as-code tools. Instead of building everything from scratch, you can get a production-ready cluster running in minutes. AKS handles the difficult parts of cluster operations, such as managing node pools and implementing auto-scaling, so you can focus on building your applications.

While AKS simplifies the lifecycle of a single cluster, managing a fleet of them for different environments introduces new challenges. Plural provides a built-in multi-cluster dashboard that acts as a single pane of glass, giving you secure, SSO-integrated visibility and control over all your AKS resources without having to manage multiple kubeconfigs or VPNs.

Use Integrated Monitoring and Diagnostics

Effective monitoring is critical for maintaining application health and performance. AKS integrates natively with Azure Monitor for containers, which automatically collects memory and processor metrics from nodes, controllers, and containers, as well as application logs. This built-in observability provides a solid foundation for troubleshooting and performance tuning without requiring you to configure a complex monitoring stack.

For teams managing infrastructure at scale, Plural enhances this by centralizing diagnostics across all clusters. Our platform not only aggregates observability data but also uses AI to provide context-aware analysis, filtering out noise to help you identify the root cause of failures quickly.

Design Your AKS Architecture

A stable, scalable Kubernetes deployment starts with thoughtful architectural choices. Before deploying workloads, it's important to define your cluster layout, networking model, and storage configuration. These decisions directly impact reliability, performance, and manageability, especially when operating multiple AKS clusters or supporting multiple teams.

Plan Your Cluster and Node Pool Strategy

Your node pool design is critical for performance and workload isolation. In AKS, node pools group VMs with identical configurations. A common best practice is to separate workloads using two types of pools:

• System node pools: Run Kubernetes system components (e.g., kube-proxy, CoreDNS, metrics-server)
• User node pools: Run your application workloads

This separation prevents application failures from affecting the core control plane components and allows for independent scaling and resource tuning.

Choose VM sizes based on workload profiles (CPU-intensive, memory-bound, or GPU-heavy). Enable the cluster autoscaler to dynamically adjust node counts based on demand and use taints and tolerations to ensure workloads land on appropriate node types

For larger platforms, keeping your node pool strategies consistent across clusters helps reduce configuration drift and simplifies lifecycle automation.

Choose the Right Networking Options

Networking is one of the most complex parts of Kubernetes, especially in hybrid or multi-cloud environments. AKS supports two primary networking models:

• Kubenet: Simplifies IP address management by assigning pod IPs from an internal range. Lower resource usage but requires NAT and custom routing for full connectivity.
• Azure CNI: Assigns each pod an IP from your Azure VNet. This allows for direct communication between pods and other Azure resources, but requires a larger IP address space and slightly more overhead.

For traffic control and security, use network policies to control pod-to-pod communication (Calico is supported in AKS) and integrate Azure Firewall or NGINX Ingress Controller for L7 traffic routing

Plural helps simplify networking across clusters by using an agent-based, egress-only tunnel. This removes the need to expose internal endpoints and enables centralized management, even for clusters in private subnets.

Manage Storage in AKS

Most real-world applications aren’t stateless—databases, caches, and queues all need reliable persistent storage. In AKS, you manage storage with Kubernetes-native primitives:

• PersistentVolumes (PVs) and PersistentVolumeClaims (PVCs) handle dynamic provisioning
• StatefulSets are used for applications that require stable identities and durable storage

AKS supports:

• Azure Disks: High-performance block storage for single-pod access
• Azure Files: Shared file storage that supports simultaneous access from multiple pods

For consistent environments, Plural lets you define and manage storage infrastructure as code using Plural Stacks. This ensures that storage classes, PVCs, and workload definitions are version-controlled and repeatable across dev, staging, and production.

How to Secure and Govern Your AKS Cluster

While AKS offloads the control plane, securing your workloads, data, and internal network traffic is still your responsibility. Governance goes beyond breach prevention—it’s about enforcing operational consistency, meeting compliance standards, and minimizing the risk of outages or lateral attacks.

A robust security posture in AKS relies on three fundamentals: access control, workload isolation, and software supply chain security. When managing multiple clusters, enforcing these standards manually becomes error-prone. That’s where tools like Plural help, offering a centralized, policy-driven approach to cluster security across your fleet.

RBAC for Scoped Permissions

Kubernetes RBAC lets you define who can access what—reducing over-privileged accounts and enforcing least privilege by design. Rather than granting broad access, you can assign fine-grained permissions per namespace or resource type based on team roles.

Plural enhances this by integrating with your identity provider, mapping user access to Kubernetes roles through impersonation. RBAC definitions can live in Git and be pushed to every cluster, ensuring access policies stay consistent and version-controlled—no need for manual syncing or out-of-band changes.

Enforce Network and Pod-Level Isolation

Locking down access is only part of the equation. You also need to restrict how workloads interact. Kubernetes Network Policies let you define which pods can communicate, reducing lateral movement in the event of a compromise. For example, you might allow your frontend to talk to an API service but block it from accessing your database directly.

Complementing this, Pod Security Standards prevent containers from running with excessive privileges, like root access or host filesystem mounts. These controls help contain compromised workloads and enforce best practices at the runtime level.

With Plural, you can verify and manage these policies across all your AKS clusters from a central dashboard, avoiding config drift and ensuring policies stay in place as clusters evolve.

Secure Your Container Images and CI/CD Workflow

Vulnerable images are one of the most common attack vectors in Kubernetes. To reduce risk, integrate container scanning into your build pipeline using tools like Trivy. This ensures that only images passing vulnerability checks make it into production.

Plural operationalizes this at scale by letting you deploy and manage security scanners like the Trivy Operator across your fleet. It integrates with GitOps pipelines, automatically enforcing compliance rules during deployment and maintaining a consistent security baseline for every environment.

A misconfigured cluster can expose your infrastructure—even with a managed control plane. By centralizing access control, network isolation, and image security with Plural, you can maintain strong governance across all your AKS clusters, reduce human error, and scale securely with confidence.

How to Monitor, Troubleshoot, and Optimize AKS

Deploying an AKS cluster is just the beginning. To ensure your applications run reliably and efficiently, you need a robust strategy for monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization. This involves using the right tools to gain visibility, quickly resolving issues as they arise, and continuously refining resource usage to manage costs. Neglecting these day-two operations can lead to performance degradation, security vulnerabilities, and uncontrolled cloud spending. A proactive approach to cluster management is essential for maintaining a healthy and cost-effective Kubernetes environment.

Integrate with Azure Monitor and the Kubernetes Dashboard

Azure provides native tools to help you observe your AKS environment. Azure Monitor is the central solution for collecting and analyzing telemetry, giving you insight into application performance and helping you proactively identify issues.

For direct interaction, the Kubernetes Dashboard offers a UI to manage cluster resources. While these tools are effective for a single cluster, managing a fleet requires a unified view. Plural’s built-in multi-cluster dashboard provides a single pane of glass for all your Kubernetes resources, regardless of where they run. It offers secure, SSO-integrated access and real-time visibility into cluster health without exposing internal endpoints, simplifying management across your entire infrastructure.

Resolve Common Issues

Developers often face persistent issues like pod crashes (CrashLoopBackOff), image pull failures, or misconfigurations that can disrupt deployments. The standard approach involves manually checking logs, describing pods, and reviewing events to diagnose the root cause. This process can be slow and requires deep Kubernetes expertise, especially in complex microservices architectures. Plural streamlines this by leveraging AI for automated issue detection and intelligent error analysis. Instead of having you sift through raw logs, Plural’s platform translates complex errors into plain English, uses its knowledge graph to pinpoint the root cause, and provides contextual recommendations for a fix, turning a lengthy troubleshooting session into a quick, guided resolution.

Manage Costs and Optimize Resources

Controlling cloud spend is a critical aspect of managing AKS. Key strategies include implementing cluster autoscaling, right-sizing node pools, and setting appropriate resource requests and limits for your pods. However, enforcing these best practices consistently across many teams and clusters is a significant challenge. Plural helps platform teams establish and maintain cost-effective infrastructure patterns. Using Plural Stacks, you can define standardized infrastructure modules with Terraform that automatically apply your organization’s policies for resource allocation and scaling. This ensures that all provisioned infrastructure is optimized from the start, preventing resource waste and giving you predictable control over your costs.

Get Started with Azure Kubernetes Service

Getting a Kubernetes cluster up and running on Azure is a straightforward process. AKS abstracts away much of the underlying complexity of the control plane, allowing your team to focus on deploying and managing applications. The initial setup is quick, but building a foundation on best practices is critical for long-term stability and scalability. Here’s a look at the first steps for launching on AKS and how to ensure your deployment is successful from day one.

Set Up Your First AKS Cluster

Microsoft makes it easy to create a production-ready Kubernetes cluster in minutes. The official Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) documentation provides detailed quickstarts and tutorials for creating clusters with both Linux and Windows Server node pools. You can provision a cluster using the Azure CLI, PowerShell, or the Azure Portal, giving you flexibility in how you manage your infrastructure. Once your cluster is live, you can install the Plural agent to bring it under a unified management plane, giving you a single pane of glass to oversee your entire fleet, whether it's fully on AKS or distributed across multiple clouds and on-prem environments.

Deploy a Sample Application

With your cluster running, the next step is to deploy an application. AKS is compatible with any standard containerized application and supports both Linux and Windows containers, making it a versatile choice for diverse workloads. While you can deploy applications manually using kubectl, this approach doesn’t scale well across multiple environments or teams. Instead, you can use Plural’s GitOps-based continuous deployment to automate the process. By connecting your Git repository, you can ensure that every application deployment is version-controlled, consistent, and auditable, which significantly reduces the risk of configuration drift and manual error.

Follow Best Practices for a Successful Deployment

While AKS simplifies cluster creation, achieving operational excellence requires a deliberate approach. It’s easy to fall into common pitfalls like inadequate resource management or neglecting security policies, which can lead to performance issues and vulnerabilities down the line. Establishing strong operations management practices from the start is essential. Plural helps enforce these standards at scale. Platform teams can build a self-service catalog of pre-configured, compliant application stacks, ensuring that developers can deploy services that automatically adhere to organizational best practices for security, resource limits, and monitoring.

Explore Advanced AKS Features

Once your cluster is operational, you can extend its capabilities to handle more complex and automated workflows. AKS provides a solid foundation for building sophisticated systems, from automated deployment pipelines to large-scale data processing platforms. Its integration with the broader Azure ecosystem and its adherence to Kubernetes standards allow for significant customization. Let's look at how you can use some of its advanced features to streamline development and run demanding applications.

Integrate CI/CD Pipelines

AKS integrates directly with services like Azure DevOps to create robust continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. This allows teams to automate everything from code commits to application deployments, including automated testing and staged rollouts. While this native integration is powerful, managing deployments across a large fleet of clusters or in a multi-cloud environment introduces complexity.

For these scenarios, Plural offers a unified continuous deployment solution. Plural CD uses a GitOps-based, agent-driven architecture to sync Kubernetes manifests to any target cluster, including AKS. This approach decouples your deployment workflow from a specific cloud provider's tooling, giving you a consistent, scalable, and secure method for managing applications across your entire Kubernetes fleet, regardless of where the clusters are running.

Run Specialized Workloads like ML and Data Processing

AKS is well-equipped to handle specialized, resource-intensive workloads like machine learning and large-scale data processing. Its ability to scale node pools and support GPU-enabled virtual machines makes it a suitable environment for training ML models and running complex data pipelines. However, setting up the necessary open-source tooling for these tasks—such as data orchestrators or MLOps platforms—can be a significant engineering effort.

Plural simplifies this process by providing a curated open-source marketplace with one-click deployment for applications like Airbyte, Dagster, and MLFlow. You can deploy a complete data or ML stack directly onto your AKS cluster in minutes, managed and maintained by Plural. This lets your team focus on building models and pipelines instead of managing the underlying application infrastructure.

Connect AKS with Azure DevOps

Connecting AKS with Azure DevOps provides a unified environment for managing source code, tracking work items, and automating builds and releases. This tight integration streamlines the development lifecycle, enhancing collaboration and productivity. Developers can manage their entire workflow, from planning to deployment, within a single ecosystem, which is a major benefit for teams already invested in Azure.

While Azure DevOps excels at application CI/CD, managing the underlying infrastructure as code (IaC) often requires a separate workflow. Plural complements this by providing API-driven infrastructure management with Plural Stacks. You can use Stacks to manage your Terraform configurations for AKS clusters and related Azure resources, creating a repeatable, version-controlled process for provisioning and updating your infrastructure. This ensures your infrastructure management is as automated and reliable as your application deployment pipeline.

How AKS Compares to Other Kubernetes Solutions

Choosing a Kubernetes platform means balancing control, cost, and cloud integration. While Kubernetes itself is open source, how you run it (self-managed vs. managed) can dramatically impact your team's operational burden and agility.

Managed vs. Self-Managed Kubernetes

The biggest decision is whether to manage the Kubernetes control plane yourself or offload it to a cloud provider.

In a self-managed setup, you're on the hook for provisioning, securing, and maintaining everything: API server, etcd, scheduler, upgrades, backups. This gives you flexibility but demands deep expertise and 24/7 operational readiness.

Managed Kubernetes (like AKS) removes most of that overhead. Azure fully manages the control plane, including high availability, patching, and version upgrades. You just manage your workloads and worker nodes. This model is ideal for teams who want to use Kubernetes without becoming Kubernetes experts.

AKS vs. EKS vs. GKE

Among managed options, the top three are:

• AKS (Azure): The Control plane is free. Deep integration with Azure AD, Azure Monitor, and Azure Policy simplifies identity, observability, and compliance. Great fit for teams already on Azure.
• EKS (AWS): Charges ~$0.10/hour per cluster control plane. Integrates well with IAM, CloudWatch, and VPC networking, but the setup is more complex than AKS.
• GKE (Google Cloud): Offers advanced features like autopilot mode and vertical pod autoscaling. Best-in-class for Kubernetes automation, but charges for control plane in some tiers.

While all three offer conformant Kubernetes APIs, their surrounding ecosystems and pricing models differ. If you're operating in a multi-cloud environment, these differences can create friction—different dashboards, auth models, tooling, and deployment pipelines.

That’s where Plural helps: it unifies cluster management across AKS, EKS, and GKE into a single control plane. You get consistent GitOps workflows, centralized policy enforcement, and simplified observability—regardless of where your clusters run.

Understand AKS Pricing and Costs

Running Kubernetes in production isn’t just about uptime—it’s also about staying within budget. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers a simple pricing model, but real-world costs add up quickly once you factor in compute, storage, networking, and operational overhead.

If you're managing multiple clusters across environments or teams, cost visibility becomes even more critical. Without a unified management layer, it’s easy to lose track of resource usage and overspend. This guide breaks down how AKS pricing works, offers cost optimization strategies, and explains how platforms like Plural help keep Kubernetes costs under control at scale.

How the AKS Pricing Model Works

The core benefit of AKS is that Azure provides the Kubernetes control plane for free. You don’t pay for the API server, etcd, or the scheduler—only for the infrastructure your workloads consume.

Your primary cost drivers are:

• Worker nodes: You pay for the VMs in your node pools (billed per second).
• Storage: Costs accrue from Azure Disks or Azure Files used via Persistent Volume Claims.
• Networking: Ingress controllers, load balancers, and egress data transfer add to your monthly bill.

This pay-as-you-go model gives you fine-grained control, but also demands active monitoring to avoid surprises.

Strategies to Optimize Your AKS Costs

To keep costs down without compromising reliability:

• Right-size your nodes: Use tools like the Azure Advisor or metrics from Azure Monitor to avoid over-provisioning.
• Use multiple node pools: Isolate workloads by VM type (e.g., run batch jobs on spot instances, web apps on standard VMs).
• Leverage auto-scaling: Enable the cluster autoscaler and horizontal pod autoscaler to adapt to demand.

For deeper visibility, Azure offers the Cost Analysis tool and namespace-level usage insights via Cost Analysis for AKS.

At scale, a platform like Plural brings all this under a central dashboard, making it easier to enforce tagging policies, monitor usage across clusters, and drive cost-efficient behaviors across environments.

Analyze Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

AKS reduces infrastructure costs by abstracting the control plane, but operational work remains. You're still responsible for:

• App deployments and rollbacks
• Resource tuning
• Monitoring and alerting
• Backup and DR
• Security patching for nodes

These tasks consume engineering hours and introduce potential risk.

Azure’s SLA offers 99.95% uptime for the API server, but achieving end-to-end reliability still depends on your team’s setup.

Platforms like Plural lower the TCO by automating app deployments, infra lifecycle management, RBAC enforcement, and observability. With a GitOps-first workflow and reusable stacks, Plural reduces human error, increases repeatability, and frees your team to focus on building features, not babysitting clusters.

Related Articles

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• Best Orchestration Tools for Kubernetes in 2024
• Docker and Kubernetes: DevOps Made Easy

Frequently Asked Questions

If Azure manages the control plane, what am I still responsible for? While AKS handles the health and maintenance of the Kubernetes control plane, your team is responsible for everything else. This includes the worker nodes, the applications you deploy, network configurations, storage, and identity and access management. Essentially, you own the security and configuration of your workloads and the infrastructure they run on. Plural helps you manage these responsibilities at scale by providing a consistent, GitOps-based workflow to configure and deploy applications and infrastructure policies across all your worker nodes.

How does AKS pricing work, and what are the main costs I should watch out for? The AKS control plane is free, which is a significant benefit. Your costs come from the Azure resources your cluster consumes. The primary expenses are the virtual machines for your worker nodes, the persistent storage your applications use (like Azure Disk or Files), and networking resources like load balancers or public IP addresses. To control costs, it's critical to right-size your nodes and use autoscaling effectively. Plural helps you enforce cost-effective patterns by allowing you to define standardized infrastructure modules with Plural Stacks, ensuring that every provisioned resource adheres to your organization's cost-optimization policies from the start.

My team uses both AKS and EKS. How can I create a consistent workflow for both? Managing clusters across different cloud providers often leads to fragmented workflows, as you have to switch between separate consoles and adapt to provider-specific tools. Plural solves this by providing a single control plane and a unified dashboard for your entire Kubernetes fleet. You can use our GitOps-based continuous deployment engine to apply the same configurations and applications to both your AKS and EKS clusters, creating a consistent, repeatable process that is independent of the underlying cloud provider.

How does Plural simplify managing access control across many AKS clusters? Managing RBAC across a fleet of clusters can be complex and error-prone. Plural streamlines this by integrating with your identity provider, like Azure AD. It uses Kubernetes Impersonation, which means access rights are tied directly to your existing user and group identities. You can define your RBAC policies as code in a Git repository and use a Plural Global Service to automatically sync these policies to every cluster in your fleet. This ensures that access controls are consistently applied and centrally managed, providing a true SSO experience for Kubernetes.

Can I use my existing Terraform code with Plural to manage AKS? Yes, absolutely. Plural Stacks is designed to integrate with your existing infrastructure-as-code practices. You can point a Stack to the Terraform code in your Git repository, and Plural will automate the execution of terraform plan on pull requests and terraform apply on merges. This brings your IaC into a Kubernetes-native, API-driven workflow, providing real-time visibility into runs, state diagrams, and outputs directly within the Plural UI, all while running on the cluster of your choice for enhanced security and control.