DevOps Classroom notes 05/Jan/2026

Managed Kubernetes

• Managed k8s refers to k8s hosted on the cloud.
• Cloud providers offer k8s as a service.
• k8s has master nodes (control plane) and worker nodes (nodes)
• Cloud providers manage control plane and for that they might charge hourly.
• The nodes will be charged according to vm sizes.
• Certain tasks become one-click
  • upgrading k8s cluster
  • backup of k8s cluster
  • monitoring and logging etc
• cloud provider give sla’s Give me k8s service on Cloud with sla's for each type of offering by popular clouds in tabular form
• In Addition to control plane manage k8s also give some features
  • Network integration (VPC/VNET)
  • Load Balancer support
  • CNI options:
    • AWS (VPC-CNI)
    • Azure CNI
    • third party CNI Options
  • Storage integration
    • CSI
      • Disk storage
      • File Share
      • Blob Storage
    • Extend CSI
  • Secrets:
    • Vault/secret managers integrations
  • Container Registry
    • ECR
    • ACR
  • Service Mesh
  • GitOps integration (Argo)
  • Observability (Prometheus, Grafana, fluentd/loki etc)
  • Scaling options
    • HPA
    • VPA
    • Other options

AKS – Azure Kubernetes Service

• AKS: We will use the free tier
• Cluster: will have one node
• To create AKS cluster we will be using azure-cli

Azure CLI setup

• windows Refer Here winget install --exact --id Microsoft.AzureCLI
• Mac brew update && brew install azure-cli
• Azure cli login

az login

• Check az group list
• Install kubectl
  • winget
  • azure cli

AKS setup using Azure CLI

• Refer Here
• Run the following commands in Azure Shell

export MY_RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME="myAKSResourceGroup"
export REGION="centralus"
export MY_AKS_CLUSTER_NAME="myAKSCluster"
export MY_DNS_LABEL="mydnslabel"
# create a resource group
az group create --name $MY_RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME --location $REGION
# create a cluster
az aks create --resource-group $MY_RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME --name $MY_AKS_CLUSTER_NAME --node-count 1 --generate-ssh-keys --node-vm-size Standard_B2ms

• Configure credentials for kubectl on local laptop

az aks get-credentials --resource-group myAKSResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster

• This command creates a file in ~/.kube with name config.
• check the connectivity

kubectl version
kubectl get nodes

Lets deploy and create a service with type loadbalancer

• manifest

---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: example-3
  labels:
    app: web
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/change-cause: "nginx"
spec:
  minReadySeconds: 5
  replicas: 4
  revisionHistoryLimit: 10
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: web
  strategy:
    type: RollingUpdate
    rollingUpdate:
      maxSurge: 25%
      maxUnavailable: 25%
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: web
        env: dev
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: web
          image: nginx
          ports:
            - containerPort: 80
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: ex3-svc
spec:
  type: LoadBalancer
  selector:
    app: web
  ports:
    - name: web
      port: 80
      targetPort: 80
      protocol: TCP

• To delete the aks cluster just delete the resource group

Useful prompts

• Understanding costs

Your are an expert in kubernetes. I want to understand in simple terms cost of running k8s cluster on Azure. Give me atleast 3 close to enterprise scenarios starting from simple to complex