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Azure Kubernetes Service

iScore74–89 · #2/4
azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/kubernetes-service · Managed Kubernetes
SEPT 2026 audit

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.

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Entry paid planNot 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.
Free tierYes
CategoryManaged Kubernetes

Updated 6 criteria comparedSources last checked

01.Evaluation guide

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.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Each value below links to the page it was read from, with the sentence it came from. Criteria Azure Kubernetes Service does not publish are not listed.

Pricing
3 criteria
Free tierYes
Sources (1) →
  • Azure Kubernetes Service pricing ↗

    “Start with the Free tier (No SLA) for experimentation and development and pay only for underlying resources.”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

Entry paid planNot 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.
Sources (1) →
  • Azure Kubernetes Service pricing ↗

    “For production workloads that require a guaranteed SLA, scalable Kubernetes control plane, and a node cluster limit up to 5,000, use Standard tier (SLA).”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

Pricing modelTiered 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.
Sources (1) →
  • Azure Kubernetes Service pricing ↗

    “Long term support can also be purchased for workloads requiring more time to migrate to a new version of Kubernetes (Premium tier).”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

Deployment
1 criteria
ContainersSupported
Sources (1) →
  • Azure Kubernetes Service pricing ↗

    “Start with the Free tier (No SLA) for experimentation and development and pay only for underlying resources.”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

Infrastructure
2 criteria
AutoscalingSupported — Standard tier raises the node limit to 5,000; Free does not say
Sources (1) →
Uptime SLANone 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.
Sources (1) →
  • Azure Kubernetes Service pricing ↗

    “backed API server uptime SLA and pod readiness SLA No SLA (Free tier) Financially backed API server uptime SLA (Standard tier)”

    Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

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Every page here is sourced and dated.