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The AKS Book: The Real-World Guide to Azure Kubernetes Service
Foreword by Brendan Burns, co-founder of Kubernetes and Corporate Vice President and Technical Fellow, Microsoft Azure Cloud-Native.
Creating an AKS cluster takes minutes. Living with the decisions takes years.
Azure Kubernetes Service offers dozens of configuration options, each with long-term cost, security, and operational implications. The wrong choice rarely fails immediately. It surfaces later as unexpected Azure bills, scaling limits, security gaps, or clusters that need to be rebuilt to fix early architectural decisions.
This book focuses on those decisions.
It is written for engineers and architects who understand Kubernetes, Azure fundamentals and are responsible for running AKS in production. Rather than step-by-step tutorials or command references, it offers a practical decision framework based on real production experience.
Inside this bookYou will learn how AKS design choices affect cost, reliability, security, and day-to-day operations,
Cluster setup decisions that influence how easy your clusters are to operate and scale
Networking choices involving CNI options, CIDR allocation, outbound connectivity, and VNet integration
Identity and access patterns using Workload Identity, managed identities, and Entra ID integration
Node pool sizing and autoscaling strategies that balance cost efficiency with performance and resilience
Cost optimisation approaches that hold up in production, including capacity planning and spot instances
Production deployment patterns such as blue-green, canary, and progressive delivery with tools like Argo Rollouts
Observability decisions that reduce time to detect and diagnose incidents without unnecessary noise
Storage and stateful workload considerations using Azure Disks, Azure Files, and managed database services
Security hardening techniques including network policies, pod security standards, and private cluster designs
Traffic management and ingress strategies and when service mesh approaches make sense
Backup, recovery, and disaster planning for both workloads and cluster state
Capacity planning and multi-region architecture using Azure-native tooling
Real-world production examples that show how decisions fail and how engineers fixed them
Each chapter presents the available options, explains the trade-offs, and describes when a particular choice makes sense. The focus is not on generic best practices, but on understanding the consequences of decisions over time.
Who this book is forThis book is written
Platform engineers building and operating production AKS clusters
Cloud architects designing multi-cluster or multi-region environments
DevOps teams responsible for reliability, scalability, and cost management
SREs dealing with AKS incidents and observability challenges
It assumes familiarity with Kubernetes
Creating an AKS cluster takes minutes. Living with the decisions takes years.
Azure Kubernetes Service offers dozens of configuration options, each with long-term cost, security, and operational implications. The wrong choice rarely fails immediately. It surfaces later as unexpected Azure bills, scaling limits, security gaps, or clusters that need to be rebuilt to fix early architectural decisions.
This book focuses on those decisions.
It is written for engineers and architects who understand Kubernetes, Azure fundamentals and are responsible for running AKS in production. Rather than step-by-step tutorials or command references, it offers a practical decision framework based on real production experience.
Inside this bookYou will learn how AKS design choices affect cost, reliability, security, and day-to-day operations,
Cluster setup decisions that influence how easy your clusters are to operate and scale
Networking choices involving CNI options, CIDR allocation, outbound connectivity, and VNet integration
Identity and access patterns using Workload Identity, managed identities, and Entra ID integration
Node pool sizing and autoscaling strategies that balance cost efficiency with performance and resilience
Cost optimisation approaches that hold up in production, including capacity planning and spot instances
Production deployment patterns such as blue-green, canary, and progressive delivery with tools like Argo Rollouts
Observability decisions that reduce time to detect and diagnose incidents without unnecessary noise
Storage and stateful workload considerations using Azure Disks, Azure Files, and managed database services
Security hardening techniques including network policies, pod security standards, and private cluster designs
Traffic management and ingress strategies and when service mesh approaches make sense
Backup, recovery, and disaster planning for both workloads and cluster state
Capacity planning and multi-region architecture using Azure-native tooling
Real-world production examples that show how decisions fail and how engineers fixed them
Each chapter presents the available options, explains the trade-offs, and describes when a particular choice makes sense. The focus is not on generic best practices, but on understanding the consequences of decisions over time.
Who this book is forThis book is written
Platform engineers building and operating production AKS clusters
Cloud architects designing multi-cluster or multi-region environments
DevOps teams responsible for reliability, scalability, and cost management
SREs dealing with AKS incidents and observability challenges
It assumes familiarity with Kubernetes
414 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 11, 2026
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