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Getting Started with kOps on Azure

WARNING: Azure support on kOps is currently in alpha, which means that it is in the early stages of development and subject to change, please use with caution.

Features

  • Create, update and delete clusters
  • Create, edit and delete instance groups
  • ...

Requirements

  • Latest kOps version installed
  • kubectl installed
  • Azure CLI installed
  • Azure account with Contributor permissions for the cluster subscription and an existing storage account
  • SSH key, both id_ed25519 and id_rsa keys are supported

Environment Variables

Enable Azure

Since Azure support is currently in alpha, it is feature gated and you will need to set:

export KOPS_FEATURE_FLAGS="Azure"

Azure-specific

export AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID=<subscription-id>
export AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT=<storage-account-name>

kOps-specific

export KOPS_STATE_STORE=azureblob://<container-name>

Creating a Single Master Cluster

# Create a cluster in zone northeurope-1
kops create cluster --cloud azure --name my.k8s --zones northeurope-1 --azure-admin-user ubuntu --yes
# Validate the cluster
kops validate cluster --name my.k8s --wait=10m
# Export the kubeconfig file with the cluster admin user (make sure you keep this user safe!)
kops export kubeconfig --name my.k8s --admin

Updating a Cluster

# Edit the cluster configuration
kops edit cluster --name my.k8s 
# Edit the nodes instance group configuration
kops edit ig --name my.k8s nodes 
# Preview the changes to be applied to the cluster
kops update cluster --name my.k8s 
# Apply the changes to the cluster
kops update cluster --name my.k8s --yes 
# Preview the node that need to be updated
kops rolling-update cluster --name my.k8s 
# Replace the nodes that need to be updated
kops rolling-update cluster --name my.k8s --yes

Deleting a Cluster

# Preview the resources to be deleted
kops delete cluster --name my.k8s 
# Delete all the cluster resources
kops delete cluster --name my.k8s --yes

TODO

kOps for Azure currently does not support the following features:

  • Azure AD Workload Identity
  • Azure Disk volumes
  • Azure Load Balancer
  • Autoscaling (using Cluster Autoscaler or Karpenter)
  • Terraform support
  • Multi-master clusters
  • ...

Next steps

Now that you have a working kOps cluster, read through the recommendations for production setups guide to learn more about how to configure kOps for production workloads.