Cannot create AKS cluster in Canada Central on Free Trial or upgraded PAYG subscription

Question

I'm working through The Kubernetes Book and created a free Azure account to work through the examples.

I cannot create an AKS cluster with any node SKU in a free account in any region; I get the error that all SKUs are unavailable. According to StackOverflow this is because the VM SKUs available in a Free Trial aren't powerful enough to run Kubernetes.

Okay, fine; I upgraded my account to Pay-As-You-Go; I don't mind paying a bit for my learning environment.

Except no, I still can't create an AKS cluster with any SKU in any region, even though you have my credit card number and my permission to charge it. I've tried logging out, using a different browser, using a different machine in case there's some bull**** cached token somewhere. No luck.

I don't know where the malfunction is and I don't care. This is an absolutely terrible, unacceptable initial user experience and I'm about to cancel the subscription and just use GCP instead.

If you're going to push Kubernetes as the One True Way for Azure going forward, then whatever you have to do, whatever marketing droid you have to strangle into submission with your bare hands to get this limitation lifted, do it. Because if you don't want my money, I'm perfectly happy not to give it to you.

Answer 1

Hello, @Chris Doherty !

Some VM sizes are unavailable as there is currently high demand for VMs in certain regions (this is especially true for free account VM sizes) and it appears that this is impacting the same resources used for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The solution is to create your VM resources in neighboring regions during these periods of high demand. If anyone is having trouble finding a region, please create a thread here on Microsoft Q&A and we will be happy to assist you.

@Chris Doherty , I'll reach out to you directly with some recommendations.

What this looks like
There are two scenarios that are being reported. Both of these are due to high VM demand in certain regions that may result in some VM sizes being unavailable.

No VM images are available from the dropdown giving an "The value must not be empty" error.

Attempting to select B1s results in the NotAvailableForSubscription error.

What is Microsoft doing to avoid capacity issues in the future?
Ensuring capacity for our customers is a top priority for Microsoft and we are working around the clock to deliver on this. The increasing demand for Azure services is evidence of the popularity of Azure, and emphasizes the need to scale up our infrastructure even more rapidly. With that in mind, we are expediting expansion and are improving our resource deployment process to respond to this strong customer demand. We have identified several improvements on how we load-balance under a high resource usage situation, and how to trigger the timely deployment of needed resources. Furthermore, we are increasing our capacity significantly – and will continue to plan for strong customer demand across all of our regions. This September 2021 blog post covers improvements towards delivering a resilient cloud supply chain.