Alongside the manual scaling of nodes, nodes can also scale automatically by updating the Kubernetes cluster. This can be done by using the az aks update command. With this command, you can set the minimum and maximum node counts. The autoscaler will then make sure that nodes are created when needed:

az aks update --resource-group mmpn-rg-kubernetes --name mykubernetescluster   --update-cluster-autoscaler --min-count 1 --max-count 5

Azure Kubernetes also has the option to scale out with Azure Container Instances. To use this option, a specific configuration needs to be applied when creating the AKS cluster. This is mainly required because Azure Container Instances needs a specific subnet within the virtual network.

In this section, we learned to scale containers and the cluster to drastically increase performance. Next up is deployment from Azure DevOps to facilitate continuous deployment.