Azure Kubernetes Service pricing and limits
iScoreMicrosoft'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.
Azure Kubernetes Service pricing at a glance
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.
Azure Kubernetes Service pricing
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- 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 · Report a correction
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- 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 · Report a correction
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- 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 · Report a correction
Deployment
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- 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 · Report a correction
Infrastructure
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- Azure Kubernetes Service pricing ↗
“scalable Kubernetes control plane, and a node cluster limit up to 5,000, use Standard tier (SLA)”
Read 2026-09-15 · official pricing · Report a correction
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- 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 · Report a correction
When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.
Azure Kubernetes Service in the news
- Microsoft 365 scales engineering expertise with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) - Microsoft
- How to Set Up Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) [2026] - tech-insider.org
- Kawasaki builds scalable robotics as a service platform with Azure Kubernetes Service - Microsoft
- CVE-2026-56163: Critical EoP in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) – Mitigated by Microsoft - SecNews.gr
Azure Kubernetes Service pricing questions
How much does Azure Kubernetes Service cost?
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.
How does Azure Kubernetes Service charge?
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.
What uptime does Azure Kubernetes Service guarantee?
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.
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