Understanding Azure Kubernetes Service and AKS Worker Nodes

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a managed Kubernetes service from Microsoft Azure that simplifies the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It abstracts away the complexity of cluster administration by handling tasks like upgrades, monitoring, and scaling automatically. With AKS, organizations can focus on building and running applications while Azure takes care of the control plane. To know more, see Azure Kubernetes Service: An Overview.

The AKS control plane is fully managed by Azure and is responsible for cluster orchestration, API server management, workload scheduling, and maintaining overall cluster health. Since it is managed, users do not need to configure or maintain the master components.

The AKS Worker Nodes are the virtual machines where applications and workloads are executed. These nodes host pods, run Kubernetes components such as kubelet and container runtime, and execute workloads assigned by the control plane. By separating the managed control plane and worker execution, AKS delivers reliability, scalability, and simplified operations for cloud-native workloads. For more details on AKS Worker, refer:Introduction to AKS Worker.