Free, Standard and Premium pricing tiers for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster management

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is now offering three pricing tiers for cluster management: the Free tier, the Standard tier and the Premium tier. All tiers are in the Base sku.

Free tier Standard tier Premium tier
When to use • You want to experiment with AKS at no extra cost
• You're new to AKS and Kubernetes
• You're running production or mission-critical workloads and need high availability and reliability
• You need a financially backed SLA
• You're running production or mission-critical workloads and need high availability and reliability
• You need a financially backed SLA.
• All mission critical, at scale or production workloads requiring 2 years of support
Supported cluster types • Development clusters or small scale testing environments
• Clusters with fewer than 10 nodes
• Enterprise-grade or production workloads
• Clusters with up to 5,000 nodes
• Enterprise-grade or production workloads
• Clusters with up to 5,000 nodes
Pricing • Free cluster management
• Pay-as-you-go for resources you consume
• Pay-as-you-go for resources you consume
Standard tier Cluster Management Pricing
• Pay-as-you-go for resources you consume
Premium tier Cluster Management Pricing
Feature comparison • Recommended for clusters with fewer than 10 nodes, but can support up to 1,000 nodes
• Includes all current AKS features
• Uptime SLA is enabled by default
• Greater cluster reliability and resources
• Can support up to 5,000 nodes in a cluster
• Includes all current AKS features
• Includes all current AKS features from standard tier
Microsoft maintenance past community support

Important

Uptime SLA has been repositioned as a default feature included with the Standard tier.

The repositioning will result in the following API changes:

SKU Prior to 2023-02-01 API Starting from 2023-02-01 API
ManagedClusterSKUName "Basic" "Base"
ManagedClusterSKUTier "Free"
"Paid"
"Free"
"Standard"

"Basic" and "Paid" are removed in the 2023-02-01 and 2023-02-02 Preview API version, and this will be a breaking change in API versions 2023-02-01 and 2023-02-02 Preview or newer. If you use automated scripts, CD pipelines, ARM templates, Terraform, or other third-party tooling that relies on the above parameters, please be sure to update the API parameters to use "Base" with "Free" or "Base" with "Standard" before upgrading to the 2023-02-01 and 2023-02-02 Preview API or newer API versions.

For more information on pricing, see the AKS pricing details.

Uptime SLA terms and conditions

In the Standard tier, the Uptime SLA feature is enabled by default per cluster. The Uptime SLA feature guarantees 99.95% availability of the Kubernetes API server endpoint for clusters using Availability Zones, and 99.9% of availability for clusters that aren't using Availability Zones.For more information, see SLA.

Region availability

  • Free tier and Standard tier are available in public regions and Azure Government regions where AKS is supported.
  • Free tier and Standard tier are available for private AKS clusters in all public regions where AKS is supported.

Before you begin

Make sure you have installed Azure CLI version 2.47.0 or later. Run az --version to find your current version. If you need to install or upgrade, see Install Azure CLI.

Create a new cluster and select the pricing tier

Use the Azure CLI to create a new cluster on an AKS pricing tier. You can create your cluster in an existing resource group or create a new one. To learn more about resource groups and working with them, see managing resource groups using the Azure CLI.

Use the az aks create command to create an AKS cluster. The commands below show you how to create a new resource group named myResourceGroup and a cluster named myAKSCluster in that resource group in each tier.

# Create a new AKS cluster in the Free tier

az aks create --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster --tier free

# Create a new AKS cluster in the Standard tier

az aks create --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster --tier standard

# Create a new AKS cluster in the Premium tier
# LongTermSupport and Premium tier should be enabled/disabled together

az aks create --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster --tier premium --k8s-support-plan AKSLongTermSupport

Once the deployment completes, it returns JSON-formatted information about your cluster:

# Sample output for --tier free

  },
  "sku": {
    "name": "Base",
    "tier": "Free"
  },

# Sample output for --tier standard

  },
  "sku": {
    "name": "Base",
    "tier": "Standard"
  },

# Sample output for --tier premium

  "sku": {
    "name": "Base",
    "tier": "Premium"
  },
  "supportPlan": "AKSLongTermSupport",

Update the tier of an existing AKS cluster

The following example uses the az aks update command to update the existing cluster.

# Update an existing cluster from the Standard tier to the Free tier

az aks update --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster --tier free

# Update an existing cluster from the Free tier to the Standard tier

az aks update --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster --tier standard

To update existing clusters from and to the Premium tier it requires also the changing the support plan.

# Update an existing cluster to the Premium tier
az aks update --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster --tier premium --k8s-support-plan AKSLongTermSupport

# Update an existing cluster to from Premium tier to Free or Standard tier
az aks update --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster --tier [free|standard] --k8s-support-plan KubernetesOfficial

This process takes several minutes to complete. You shouldn't experience any downtime while your cluster tier is being updated. When finished, the following example JSON snippet shows updating the existing cluster to the Standard tier in the Base SKU.

  },
  "sku": {
    "name": "Base",
    "tier": "Standard"
  },

Next steps