Tutorial: Create a cluster with the Azure Linux Container Host for AKS

To create a cluster with the Azure Linux Container Host, you will use:

1. Azure resource groups, a logical container into which Azure resources are deployed and managed.
2. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), a hosted Kubernetes service that allows you to quickly create a production ready Kubernetes cluster.

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

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

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

Prerequisites

• If you don't have an Azure subscription, create an Azure free account before you begin.
• 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.

1 - Install the Kubernetes CLI

Use the Kubernetes CLI, kubectl, to connect to the Kubernetes cluster from your local computer.

If you don't already have kubectl installed, install it through Azure CLI using az aks install-cli or follow the upstream instructions.

az aks install-cli

2 - Create a resource group

When creating a resource group, it is required to specify a location. This location is:

• The storage location of your resource group metadata.
• Where your resources will run in Azure if you don't specify another region when creating a resource.

Create a resource group with the az group create command. To create a resource group named testAzureLinuxResourceGroup in the eastus region, follow this step:

az group create --name testAzureLinuxResourceGroup --location eastus

Note

The above example uses eastus, but Azure Linux Container Host clusters are available in all regions.

3 - Create an Azure Linux Container Host 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. The following example creates an Azure Linux Container Host cluster named testAzureLinuxCluster using the testAzureLinuxResourceGroup resource group created in the previous step:

az aks create --name testAzureLinuxCluster --resource-group testAzureLinuxResourceGroup --os-sku AzureLinux

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

4 - Connect to the cluster using kubectl

To configure kubectl to connect to your Kubernetes cluster, use the az aks get-credentials command. The following example gets credentials for the Azure Linux Container Host cluster named testAzureLinuxCluster in the testAzureLinuxResourceGroup resource group:

az aks get-credentials --resource-group testAzureLinuxResourceGroup --name testAzureLinuxCluster

To verify the connection to your cluster, run the kubectl get nodes command to return a list of the cluster nodes:

kubectl get nodes

Next steps

In this tutorial, you created and deployed an Azure Linux Container Host cluster. You learned how to:

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

In the next tutorial, you'll learn how to add an Azure Linux node pool to an existing cluster.

Add an Azure Linux node pool