Tutorial: Create a cluster with Azure Container Linux (ACL) for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

In this tutorial, part one of five, you learn how to:

• Install the Kubernetes CLI, kubectl.
• Create an Azure resource group.
• Create and deploy an ACL cluster.
• Configure kubectl to connect to your ACL cluster.

In later tutorials, you learn how to add an ACL node pool to an existing cluster and migrate existing nodes to ACL.

Azure Container Linux (ACL) considerations and limitations

Before you begin, review the following considerations and limitations for ACL:

• ACL is generally available starting AKS v1.34.
• ACL requires Trusted Launch with Secure Boot and vTPM. Non-Trusted Launch variants aren't available.
• ACL on Arm64 requires Cobalt-based (v6) SKUs to enable Trusted Launch compatibility.
• NodeImage and None are the only supported operating system (OS) upgrade channels. Unmanaged and SecurityPatch are incompatible with ACL due to the immutable /usr directory.
• Artifact Streaming isn't supported.
• Pod Sandboxing isn't supported.
• Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) aren't supported.
• Generation 1 VMs aren't supported.
• FIPS-enabled nodes aren't supported.

Prerequisites

• Azure Container Linux requires Azure CLI version 2.86.0 or higher. Use the az version command to find the version. To upgrade to the latest version, use the az upgrade command.

Set environment variables

Set the following environment variables to create unique resource names for each deployment:

export RESOURCE_GROUP="<your-resource-group-name>"
export REGION="<your-region>"
export CLUSTER_NAME="<your-cluster-name>"

Create a resource group

When creating a resource group in Azure, you're required to specify a location. This location is the storage location of your resource group metadata and where your resources run in Azure if you don't specify another region when creating a resource.

Create a resource group using the az group create command.

az group create --name $RESOURCE_GROUP --location $REGION

Example output:

{
  "id": "/subscriptions/xxxxx/resourceGroups/myACLResourceGroup",
  "location": "westus",
  "managedBy": null,
  "name": "myACLResourceGroup",
  "properties": {
    "provisioningState": "Succeeded"
  },
  "tags": null,
  "type": "Microsoft.Resources/resourceGroups"
}

Create an ACL cluster

Create an AKS cluster using the az aks create command with the --os-sku AzureContainerLinux parameter to provision an ACL cluster. The following example creates an ACL cluster with three nodes:

az aks create \
  --name $CLUSTER_NAME \
  --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP \
  --os-sku AzureContainerLinux \
  --node-count 3 \
  --generate-ssh-keys

Example output:

{
  "id": "/subscriptions/xxxxx/resourceGroups/myACLResourceGroup/providers/Microsoft.ContainerService/managedClusters/myACLCluster",
  "location": "westus",
  "name": "myACLCluster",
  "properties": {
    "provisioningState": "Succeeded"
  },
  "type": "Microsoft.ContainerService/managedClusters"
}

After a few minutes, the command completes and returns JSON-formatted information about the cluster.

Connect to the cluster using kubectl

Configure kubectl to connect to your Kubernetes cluster using the az aks get-credentials command. The following example gets credentials for the ACL cluster:

az aks get-credentials --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --name $CLUSTER_NAME

Verify the connection to your cluster

Verify the connection to your cluster using the kubectl get nodes command to return a list of the cluster nodes.

kubectl get nodes

Example output:

NAME                                STATUS   ROLES   AGE     VERSION
aks-nodepool1-00000000-0            Ready    agent   10m     v1.34.0
aks-nodepool1-00000000-1            Ready    agent   10m     v1.34.0
aks-nodepool1-00000000-2            Ready    agent   10m     v1.34.0

Next step

In this tutorial, you created and deployed an ACL cluster. In the next tutorial, you learn how to add an ACL node pool to an existing cluster.

Add an ACL node pool