Free and Standard pricing tiers for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster management

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Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is now offering two pricing tiers for cluster management: the Free tier and the Standard tier. Both tiers are in the Base sku.

Free tier Standard tier
When to use • You want to experiment with AKS at no extra cost
• You're new to AKS and Kubernetes		 • You're running production or mission-critical workloads and need high availability and reliability
• You need a financially backed SLA
• Automatically selected for AKS automatic clusters
Supported cluster types • Development clusters or small scale testing environments
• Clusters with fewer than 10 nodes		 • Enterprise-grade or production workloads
• Clusters with up to 5,000 nodes
Pricing • Free cluster management
• Standard Pay-in-Advance Offer for resources you consume		 • Standard Pay-in-Advance Offer for resources you consume
Feature comparison • Recommended for clusters with fewer than 10 nodes, but can support up to 1,000 nodes
• Includes all current AKS features		 • Uptime SLA is enabled by default
• Greater cluster reliability and resources
• Can support up to 5,000 nodes in a cluster
• Includes all current AKS features

For more information on pricing, see the AKS pricing details.

Uptime SLA terms and conditions

In the Standard tier, the Uptime SLA feature is enabled by default per cluster. The Uptime SLA feature guarantees 99.95% availability of the Kubernetes API server endpoint for clusters using Availability Zones, and 99.9% of availability for clusters that aren't using Availability Zones.

Region availability

  • Free tier and Standard tier are available in public regions and Azure China cloud regions where AKS is supported.
  • Free tier and Standard tier are available for private AKS clusters in all public regions where AKS is supported.

Before you begin

You need Azure CLI version 2.47.0 or later. Run az --version to find your current version. If you need to install or upgrade, see Install Azure CLI.

Create a new cluster and select the pricing tier

Use the Azure CLI to create a new cluster on an AKS pricing tier. You can create your cluster in an existing resource group or create a new one. To learn more about resource groups and working with them, see managing resource groups using the Azure CLI.

Use the az aks create command to create an AKS cluster. The following commands show you how to create a new cluster in the Free, Standard tiers.

# Create a new AKS cluster in the Free tier

az aks create \
    --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP \
    --name $CLUSTER_NAME \
    --tier free \
    --generate-ssh-keys

# Create a new AKS cluster in the Standard tier

az aks create \
    --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP \
    --name $CLUSTER_NAME \
    --tier standard \
    --generate-ssh-keys

# Create a new AKS cluster in the Premium tier
# LongTermSupport and Premium tier should be enabled/disabled together

az aks create \
    --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP \
    --name $CLUSTER_NAME \
    --tier premium \
    --k8s-support-plan AKSLongTermSupport \
    --generate-ssh-keys

Once the deployment completes, it returns JSON-formatted information about your cluster:

# Sample output for --tier free

  },
  "sku": {
    "name": "Base",
    "tier": "Free"
  },

# Sample output for --tier standard

  },
  "sku": {
    "name": "Base",
    "tier": "Standard"
  },

Update the tier of an existing AKS cluster

The following example uses the az aks update command to update the existing cluster.

# Update an existing cluster from the Standard tier to the Free tier

az aks update --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --name $CLUSTER_NAME --tier free

# Update an existing cluster from the Free tier to the Standard tier

az aks update --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --name $CLUSTER_NAME --tier standard

This process takes several minutes to complete. You shouldn't experience any downtime while your cluster tier is being updated. When finished, the following example JSON snippet shows updating the existing cluster to the Standard tier in the Base SKU.

  },
  "sku": {
    "name": "Base",
    "tier": "Standard"
  },

Next steps