Scott Gerold - Future Systems

Azure Kubernetes Service - Part 2 - Creating an AKS Cluster

I am creating a series of blog posts around AKS as part of my own self-learning and research. My primary goal is to learn the basics of AKS and how to use it. The first post (found here) is about obtaining a general understanding of AKS and the terminology used.

The next step is about creating an AKS environment that can support my continued learning and future posts
. This brings us to this step: Creating an AKS Cluster. My objective here is to not only create an AKS cluster, but automate the process to be able to spin-up AKS clusters at my will. This will allow me to shut down and remove Azure resources as needed and saving costs while learning and blogging about AKS. This post will show how to automate the creation of an AKS cluster using anyone of the three different tools (pick you favorite)

Azure CLI
Terraform
BICEP

Azure CLI

I execute the following Azure CLI script inside the Azure Portal:

  
  # Set variables
RESOURCE_GROUP="myResourceGroup"
AKS_CLUSTER_NAME="myAKSCluster"
LOCATION="eastus"
NODE_COUNT=1
NODE_VM_SIZE="Standard_DS2_v2"# Create a resource group

az group create --name $RESOURCE_GROUP --location $LOCATION

# Create AKS cluster
az aks create \
  --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP \
  --name $AKS_CLUSTER_NAME \
  --node-count $NODE_COUNT \
  --node-vm-size $NODE_VM_SIZE \
  --generate-ssh-keys

# Get AKS credentials
az aks get-credentials --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --name $AKS_CLUSTER_NAME

Terraform

I store the following Terraform script in main.tf and execute the Terraform Init, Plan , and Apply to deploy the AKS service. I need to do future blog post on executing Terraform scripts. Terraform is my default IAC tool.

 provider "azurerm" {
  features {}
}

resource "azurerm_resource_group" "aks_rg" {
  name     = "myResourceGroup"
  location = "eastus"
}

resource "azurerm_kubernetes_cluster" "aks_cluster" {
  name                = "myAKSCluster"
  location            = azurerm_resource_group.aks_rg.location
  resource_group_name = azurerm_resource_group.aks_rg.name
  dns_prefix          = "myaks"

  default_node_pool {
    name       = "default"
    node_count = 1
    vm_size    = "Standard_DS2_v2"
  }

  identity {
    type = "SystemAssigned"
  }

  tags = {
    environment = "development"
  }
}

output "kube_config" {
  value = azurerm_kubernetes_cluster.aks_cluster.kube_config_raw
  sensitive = true
}

Bicep

I created the following main.bicep scrip

  
 resource aksCluster 'Microsoft.ContainerService/managedClusters@2023-01-01' = {

   name: 'myAKSCluster'
  location: resourceGroup().location

  identity: {

     type: 'SystemAssigned'

 }

 properties: {

     dnsPrefix: 'myaks'

     agentPoolProfiles: [

     {
         name: 'agentpool'

         count: 1

         vmSize: 'Standard_DS2_v2'

         osType: 'Linux'

        mode: 'System'

     } 
 ]

 kubernetesVersion: '1.25.0' // Example version, update as necessary

 enableRBAC: true

 }
}


 output aksName string = aksCluster.name
# Create a resource group
az group create --name myResourceGroup --location eastus

# Deploy the Bicep template
az deployment group create --resource-group myResourceGroup --template-file main.bicep

All 3 options will create a Kubernetes Service with cluster named "myAKSCluster" with a single node in the resource group called "myResourceGroup". After a few minutes I had an AKS cluster shown below:

Testing my installation

Use "kubectl get nodes" to test you installation...

This post is more technical in nature and is about setting up the environment to continue my learning going forward. I can quickly delete the created resource group and no recreate my AKS cluster as needed. Please feel free to contact me if you need more details on setting up your AKS cluster.