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

To create a cluster with the Azure Linux Container Host, you 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 learn how to:

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.

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 run in Azure if you don't specify another region when creating a resource.

Before running the command, environment variables are declared to ensure unique resource names for each deployment.

export REGION="EastUS2"
az group create --name $RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME --___location $REGION

{
  "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 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.

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

{
  "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

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 using the resource group and cluster name created earlier:

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

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

kubectl get nodes

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 steps

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

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