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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
  • Generate Terraform configuration with --target=terraform (experimental, requires AzureTerraform feature flag)
  • ...

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>

kOps-specific

export KOPS_STATE_STORE=azureblob://<storage-account-name>/<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)
  • 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.

Migrating from earlier alpha versions

Older alpha releases used azureblob://<container>/... URLs and read the storage account from AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT. To upgrade an existing cluster:

  1. unset AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT and re-export KOPS_STATE_STORE in the new shape.
  2. kops edit cluster to update spec.configStore.base to the updated URL.
  3. kops update cluster --yes and kops rolling-update cluster --yes.