AKS is a Kubernetes service that is managed in Azure. This has the advantage of being integrated with Azure, some of which are listed as follows:

• Ready to use: In AKS, the Kubernetes web dashboard is natively installed, and the documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/kubernetes-dashboard explains how to access it.
• Integrated monitoring services: AKS also has all of Azure's integrated monitoring services, including container monitoring, cluster performance management, and log management, as shown in the following screenshot:

• Very easy to scale: AKS allows the quick and direct scaling of the number of nodes of a cluster via the portal, or via scripts.

As we can see in the following screenshot, we choose the number of nodes that we want in the Azure portal, and the change is effective immediately:

If we have an Azure subscription and we want to use Kubernetes, it's intuitive and quick to install. AKS has a number of advantages, such as integrated monitoring and scaling in the Azure portal. Using the kubectl tool does not require any changes compared to a local Kubernetes.

In this section, we have discussed AKS, which is a managed Kubernetes service in Azure. Then, we created an AKS instance and configured kubectl in order to connect to it. Finally, we listed its advantages, which are mainly integrated monitoring and fast scalability.

In the next section, we will see how to deploy an application in AKS Kubernetes by using a CI/CD pipeline with Azure Pipelines.