Migrate workloads to AKS engine from AKS preview on Azure Stack Hub

This article explains how to migrate existing workloads in the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) preview on Azure Stack Hub to AKS engine, and summarizes AKS feature differences. The AKS preview is being deprecated in favor of extending support for AKS engine on Azure Stack Hub.

AKS engine provides a command-line tool to bootstrap Kubernetes clusters on Azure and Azure Stack Hub. By using Azure Resource Manager, AKS engine helps you create and maintain clusters running on VMs, virtual networks, and other Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) resources in Azure Stack Hub. To learn more about AKS engine, see the AKS engine overview, and review the AKS engine feature comparison in this article.

Migrate workloads to AKS engine

You can run AKS and AKS engine on Azure Stack Hub at the same time. To minimize application downtime, deploy and verify workloads on AKS engine before you delete the AKS clusters you created in the AKS preview.

To move workloads to AKS engine, do the following steps:

1. Meet the prerequisites for AKS engine.

2. Deploy a cluster using AKS engine.

3. Deploy your running workloads on the Kubernetes cluster created with AKS engine.

4. Verify that your newly deployed workloads are running successfully on AKS engine.

5. (Optional) Delete your deployed AKS clusters from the AKS preview after you verify a successful deployment via AKS engine.

Compare features: AKS engine vs. AKS preview

The following table compares AKS features in global Azure with features in the AKS preview on Azure Stack Hub, which is being deprecated, and AKS engine on Azure Stack Hub.

Area	Feature	Azure AKS	Azure Stack Hub AKS preview (1)	AKS engine on Azure Stack Hub
Access Security
	Kubernetes RBAC	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Security Center Integration	Yes	Yes	No
	Microsoft Entra auth/RBAC	Yes	No	No
	Calico Network Policy	Yes	No	No
Monitoring & Logging
	Integrated Azure Monitoring (Insights, Logs, Metrics, Alerts)	Yes	No	Yes
	Monitoring and Remediation of Master Nodes	Yes	Yes	No
	Cluster Metrics	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Advisor Recommendations	Yes	No	No
	Diagnostic settings	Yes	Yes	No (2)
	Kubernetes Control Plane Logs	Yes	Yes	No (3)
	Workbooks	Yes	No	No
Clusters & Nodes
	Automatic Node Scaling (Autoscaler)	Yes	No	No
	Automatic Pod Scaling	Yes	Yes	Yes
	GPU Enable Pods	Yes	No	No
	Storage Volume Support	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Multi node pool Management	Yes	No	No
	Azure Container Instance Integration & Virtual Node	Yes	No	No
	Uptime SLA	Yes	No	No
	Hidden Master Nodes	Yes	No	No
Virtual Networks and Ingress
	Default VNET	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Custom VNET	Yes	Yes	Yes
	HTTP Ingress	Yes	No	No
Development Tooling
	Helm	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Dev Studio	Yes	No	No
	DevOps Starter	Yes	No	No
	Docker image support and private container registry	Yes	Yes	Yes
Certifications
	CNCF-certified	Yes	Yes	Yes
Management Interfaces
	AKS UX	Yes	Yes	No
	AKS CLI (Windows and Linux)	Yes	Yes	No
	AKS API	Yes	Yes	No
	AKS Templates	Yes	Yes	No
	AKS PowerShell	Yes	No	No

(1) Discontinued.

(2) To collect diagnostic logs, log in to the VM to gather this information.

(3) AKS engine isn't a managed service, so these logs aren't created. To collect diagnostic information, log in to the VM to gather this information.

Next steps

• Learn more about AKS engine