The best practice for deploying to AKS is to use a combination of GitOps and Helm.
GitOps is a methodology that uses Git as a single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and application deployments. In this approach, all of the Kubernetes manifests for a specific microservice or application would be stored in a single Git repository. This repository would be the source of truth for what should be deployed to the cluster.
Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that allows you to define, install, and upgrade complex Kubernetes applications. Helm uses a package format called charts, which are collections of Kubernetes manifests that can be versioned and managed as a single unit.
Using GitOps and Helm together, you can deploy your entire cluster all at once by updating the chart in the Git repository, which will automatically trigger a deployment in AKS. Additionally, you can use Git webhooks to automatically trigger updates in AKS when a new commit is merged. This way you can signal AKS to update itself with the new application image without having developers to modify the yaml file every single time a commit is merged.
You can also use Azure DevOps Pipelines with Kubernetes manifest task for your CI/CD pipeline.