How to Deploy Apps to an AKS Cluster

Azure has made it easy to deploy your applications to a Kubernetes cluster with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

AKS is a managed Kubernetes service that makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. This blog post will walk you through the steps necessary to deploy an application to an AKS cluster.

Manifest File

Kubernetes manifest files are used to describe the desired state of a cluster or individual Kubernetes objects. Manifest files are written in YAML and can deploy applications, services, and more. This blog post will walk you through the steps necessary to deploy an application to an AKS cluster using a manifest file.

Below is the manifest file I will use to deploy a simple application to AKS (Using Ubuntu image). The file is called deployment.yaml

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: server-deployment
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: server-app
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: server-app
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: server-app
          image: ubuntu
          command: ["/bin/sh"]
          args: ["-c", "sleep infinity"]
      restartPolicy: Always 

Login and Authenticate

To deploy the application, we need to use Azure CLI. I will log in to Azure from my terminal and authenticate to my cluster using the two commands below. Make sure you know your cluster resource group name and cluster name.

az login

az aks get-credentials --resource-group aks --name akscluster01

Deploy

The final will be deploying the application using the following kubectl command.

kubectl apply -f deployment.yaml

To check the deployment run

 kubectl get pods

Please visit the following blog post if you have trouble logging into your AKS cluster using Azure CLI.

How To Connect to an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Cluster With Azure CLI and Kubectl