Connect Kubernetes clusters to Azure Arc

  • 5 minutes

Azure Arc extends the scope of the Azure management plane to resources located on-premises and in other clouds. To use Azure Arc, you must establish an outbound connection from these resources to Azure.

In this unit, you learn how to connect a Kubernetes cluster to Azure Arc.

Connect a Kubernetes cluster to Azure Arc

To connect a Kubernetes cluster to Azure Arc, you deploy the Azure Arc agents for Kubernetes into the azure-arc namespace on the cluster.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, you need:

  • An existing Kubernetes cluster. All Kubernetes distributions certified by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) are supported.
  • Outbound connectivity from the cluster to Azure and other Microsoft endpoints. For details regarding target URLs and ports, refer to your product documentation.
  • A user account or service principal in the Microsoft Entra tenant for the subscription that hosts Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes. This account must have at least the Kubernetes Cluster - Azure Arc Onboarding Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) built-in role.
  • The latest version of Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell installed on your management computer. This example uses Azure CLI.

Connection process

The process of connecting a Kubernetes cluster to Azure Arc consists of the following high-level steps.

  1. Start an Azure CLI session on a computer with connectivity to the Kubernetes cluster and to Azure.
  2. Sign in to a Microsoft Entra account that has permissions to manage Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes in the subscription.
  3. Register the Azure resource providers that let you manage Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes.
  4. Designate a new or existing Azure resource group to host the resource that represents the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster.
  5. Connect the Kubernetes cluster to Azure by running the az connectedk8s connect Azure CLI command. This command installs the agents on the cluster and creates the cluster resource in the specified resource group.
  6. Verify the connection by running the az connectedk8s list command to list connected clusters.

After you deploy the agent on a cluster, you can manage the cluster in Azure along with other cluster resources. You can also deploy applications and Azure services to connected clusters.

Connect to clusters from anywhere

Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes provides a cluster connect feature that lets you access Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters from anywhere, allowing for interactive development and debugging. This feature lets you securely connect to your clusters without requiring any inbound port to be enabled on the firewall. A reverse proxy agent that runs on the cluster can securely start a session with the Azure Arc service in an outbound manner.

You can use cluster connect to provide cluster access to Azure services for custom locations and their deployed resources. You can use hosted agents or runners from Azure Pipelines, GitHub Actions, or any hosted continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) service to deploy applications to on-premises clusters.