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Tutorial: Create a cluster with the Azure Linux Container Host 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 Azure Linux Container Host for AKS cluster.
  • Configure kubectl to connect to your Azure Linux Container Host cluster.

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

Prerequisites

  • You need the latest version of Azure CLI. Run az --version to find the version. If you need to install or upgrade, see Install Azure CLI.

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/testAzureLinuxResourceGroupxxxxx",
  "location": "EastUS2",
  "managedBy": null,
  "name": "testAzureLinuxResourceGroupxxxxx",
  "properties": {
    "provisioningState": "Succeeded"
  },
  "tags": null,
  "type": "Microsoft.Resources/resourceGroups"
}

Create an Azure Linux Container Host for AKS cluster

Create an AKS cluster using the az aks create command with the --os-sku parameter to provision the Azure Linux Container Host with an Azure Linux image.

az aks create --name $CLUSTER_NAME --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --os-sku AzureLinux

Example output:

{
  "id": "/subscriptions/xxxxx/resourceGroups/testAzureLinuxResourceGroupxxxxx/providers/Microsoft.ContainerService/managedClusters/testAzureLinuxClusterxxxxx",
  "location": "WestUS2",
  "name": "testAzureLinuxClusterxxxxx",
  "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.

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. The command returns a list of nodes in your cluster.

kubectl get nodes

Example output:

NAME                           STATUS   ROLES   AGE     VERSION
aks-nodepool1-00000000-0       Ready    agent   10m     v1.20.7
aks-nodepool1-00000000-1       Ready    agent   10m     v1.20.7

Next step

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

Add an Azure Linux node pool

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