Introduction
Today the new “AKS” (Azure Kubernetes Services) was launched in preview. This is a managed container service. So where ACS used to rely on IaaS and used a set of best practices to deploy the cluster. AKS will go a step further, where it’ll managed the master nodes & provide upgrade tracks.
Deploying
Let’s start with deploying an AKS cluster… Here we can select the k8s (kubernetes) version too.
Next up is the screen we’re accustomed too. New thing to note… There are NO master nodes! So that part is fully managed for you!
Let’s validate & deploy!
Which results in a nice (currently unidentified) object…
And an agentpool ;
Let’s go Kubectl!
Once deployed, be sure to install your kubectl (if you hadn’t already)
Afterwards, get your kubectl credentials (kubeconfig) ;
And with the “kubectl get pods”, you’ll only see the agents (and NOT the masters).
If we take alook at the versions, we see that our cluster is running the expected 1.8.1 version.
What about “az aks”
The Azure CLI will have an additional command “aks”… Here you can see its current capabilities ;
Let’s scale down our cluster from 3 to 1 node. 😉
Which carries out nicely!
Now let’s try to downgrade shall we?
Okay, that did not work out well… 😉
Closing Thoughts
- The AKS is the PaaS successor where ACS was mainly an IaaS deployment
- There is an option to upgrade!
- The ease-of-deployment / management remains the same.
- Bare in mind that this is currently in preview. As you can notice with the portal not being able to identify the object yet. So don’t use it in production.
Karim Vaes 
How can we see the master or connect to the master node in the AKS account
do the “az aks get-credentials” and then you can do “kubectl” as you would otherwise…