Quotas, virtual machine size restrictions, and region availability in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

All Azure services set default limits and quotas for resources and features, including usage restrictions for certain virtual machine (VM) SKUs.

This article details the default resource limits for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) resources and the availability of AKS in Azure regions.

Service quotas and limits

Resource	Limit
Maximum clusters per subscription	5000 Note: spread clusters across different regions to account for Azure API throttling limits
Maximum nodes per cluster with Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Standard Load Balancer SKU	5000 across all node pools (default limit: 1000) Note: Running more than a 1000 nodes per cluster requires increasing the default node limit quota. Contact support for assistance.
Maximum nodes per node pool (Virtual Machine Scale Sets node pools)	1000
Maximum node pools per cluster	100
Maximum pods per node: with Kubenet networking plug-in1	Maximum: 250 Azure CLI default: 110 Azure Resource Manager template default: 110 Azure portal deployment default: 30
Maximum pods per node: with Azure Container Networking Interface (Azure CNI)1	Maximum: 250 Maximum recommended for Windows Server containers: 110 Default: 30
Open Service Mesh (OSM) AKS addon	Kubernetes Cluster Version: AKS Supported Versions OSM controllers per cluster: 1 Pods per OSM controller: 1600 Kubernetes service accounts managed by OSM: 160
Maximum load-balanced kubernetes services per cluster with Standard Load Balancer SKU	300
Maximum nodes per cluster with Virtual Machine Availability Sets and Basic Load Balancer SKU	100

¹ Windows Server containers must use Azure CNI networking plug-in. Kubenet is not supported for Windows Server containers.

Kubernetes Control Plane tier	Limit
Standard tier	Automatically scales Kubernetes API server based on load. Larger control plane component limits and API server/etc instances.
Free tier	Limited resources with inflight requests limit of 50 mutating and 100 read-only calls. Recommended node limit of 10 nodes per cluster. Best for experimenting, learning, and simple testing. Not advised for production/critical workloads.

Provisioned infrastructure

All other network, compute, and storage limitations apply to the provisioned infrastructure. For the relevant limits, see Azure subscription and service limits.

Supported VM sizes

The list of supported VM sizes in AKS is evolving with the release of new VM SKUs in Azure. Please follow the AKS release notes to stay informed of new supported SKUs.

Restricted VM sizes

VM sizes with fewer than two CPUs may not be used with AKS. Each node in an AKS cluster contains a fixed amount of compute resources such as vCPU and memory. If an AKS node contains insufficient compute resources, pods might fail to run correctly. To ensure that the required kube-system pods and your applications can reliably be scheduled, don't use B series VMs and the following VM SKUs in AKS on system node pools:

• Standard_A0
• Standard_A1
• Standard_A1_v2
• Standard_F1
• Standard_F1s

For more information on VM types and their compute resources, see Sizes for virtual machines in Azure.

Supported container image sizes

AKS doesn't set a limit on the container image size. However, it's important to understand that the larger the container image, the higher the memory demand. This could potentially exceed resource limits or the overall available memory of worker nodes. By default, memory for VM size Standard_DS2_v2 for an AKS cluster is set to 7 GiB.

When a container image is very large (1 TiB or more), kubelet might not be able to pull it from your container registry to a node due to lack of disk space.

Region availability

For the latest list of where you can deploy and run clusters, see AKS region availability.

Cluster configuration presets in the Azure portal

When you create a cluster using the Azure portal, you can choose a preset configuration to quickly customize based on your scenario. You can modify any of the preset values at any time.

Preset	Description
Production Standard	Best for most applications serving production traffic with AKS recommended best practices.
Dev/Test	Best for developing new workloads or testing existing workloads.
Production Economy	Best for serving production traffic in a cost conscious way if your workloads can tolerate interruptions.
Production Enterprise	Best for serving production traffic with rigorous permissions and hardened security.

	Production Standard	Dev/Test	Production Economy	Production Enterprise
System node pool node size	Standard_D8ds_v5	Standard_DS2_v2	Standard_D8ds_v5	Standard_D16ds_v5
System node pool autoscaling range	2-5 nodes	2-100 nodes	2-5 nodes	2-5 nodes
User node pool node size	Standard_D8ds_v5	-	Standard_D8as_v4	Standard_D8ds_v5
User node pool autoscaling range	2-100 nodes	-	-	2-100 nodes
Private cluster	-	-	-
Availability zones		-	-
Azure Policy		-	-
Azure Monitor		-	-
Secrets store CSI driver		-	-
Network configuration	Azure CNI	Kubenet	Azure CNI	Azure CNI
Network configuration	Calico	Calico	Calico	Calico
Authentication and Authorization	Local accounts with Kubernetes RBAC	Local accounts with Kubernetes RBAC	Azure AD Authentication with Azure RBAC	Azure AD authentication with Azure RBAC

Next steps

You can increase certain default limits and quotas. If your resource supports an increase, request the increase through an Azure support request (for Issue type, select Quota).