# Azure Kubernetes Service

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/kubernetes/azure-aks/

Microsoft's managed Kubernetes, sold as a free control plane with no SLA or a paid tier with one, plus a premium tier for long-term version support.

## Who it suits

Starting without paying for a control plane at all: the Free tier costs nothing and you pay only for nodes, which is the cheapest way into managed Kubernetes on a hyperscaler.

Consider something else if You want to know what production costs. The Free tier has no SLA in Azure's own words, Standard buys one, and the page prints no figure for either — the tier names render and the prices are filled in by an API after load.

## iScore

82 / 100 (80% interval 74–89), rank 2 of 4 in kubernetes — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every kubernetes peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/kubernetes/azure-aks/alternatives/

- Price: 81 (59–100), weight 36%, 1 of 2 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: minimum_paid_price
- Capabilities: 100 (94–100), weight 29%, 2 of 2 criteria scored
- Trust and compliance: 50 (44–56), weight 21%, 0 of 1 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: uptime_sla
- Evidence: 94 (94–94), weight 14%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/kubernetes-service/), read 2026-09-15)
- Entry paid plan: Not readable. The page names three tiers — Free with no SLA, Standard with one, Premium for long-term version support — and prints no figure against any of them in text, the same way Azure's SLA pages and Amazon's OpenSearch OCU rate do not. ([source](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/kubernetes-service/), read 2026-09-15)
- Pricing model: Tiered by what the control plane promises rather than by capacity: Free has no SLA, Standard has one and raises the node limit to 5,000, Premium buys long-term support for older Kubernetes versions. Nodes are billed as ordinary Azure compute underneath. ([source](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/kubernetes-service/), read 2026-09-15)

### Deployment

- Containers: Supported ([source](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/kubernetes-service/), read 2026-09-15)

### Infrastructure

- Autoscaling: Supported — Standard tier raises the node limit to 5,000; Free does not say ([source](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/kubernetes-service/), read 2026-09-15)
- Uptime SLA: None on the Free tier, stated in those words. Standard adds a financially backed API server uptime SLA and a pod readiness SLA; no percentage is printed on the pricing page. ([source](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/kubernetes-service/), read 2026-09-15)

## Compared with

- [Azure Kubernetes Service vs Amazon EKS](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-eks-vs-azure-aks/)
- [Azure Kubernetes Service vs Google Kubernetes Engine](https://inetgeek.com/compare/google-gke-vs-azure-aks/)
- [Azure Kubernetes Service vs DigitalOcean Kubernetes](https://inetgeek.com/compare/azure-aks-vs-digitalocean-kubernetes/)