The following is the detailing of the Azure AKS cluster provisioning from Spectro Cloud:

• Spectro Cloud enables the effortless deployment and management of containerised applications with fully-managed Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
• It provides the users with serverless Kubernetes, an integrated continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and enterprise-grade security and governance.
• This unites the development and operations to a single platform achieving faster build, delivery, and scaling of applications with credences.
• The infrastructure has an event-driven autoscaling and triggers, that enable Elastic provisioning for this self-managed infrastructure.
• Extensive authentication and authorization capabilities using Azure Active Directory and dynamic rules enforcement across multiple clusters with Azure Policy.

The following prerequisites must be met before deploying an AKS workload cluster:

• You must have an active Azure cloud account with sufficient resource limits and permissions to provision compute, network and security resources in the desired regions.
• You must have permissions to deploy clusters using AKS service on Azure.
• You must register your Azure cloud account in Spectro Cloud as descrbed in the "Creating an Azure Cloud account" section below.
• You should have an Infrastructure cluster profile created in Spectro Cloud for AKS.
• Following are additional prerequisites if Azure Active Directory integration for the AKS cluster is desried:
  • A Tenant Name must be provided as part of the Azure cloud account creation in Spectro Cloud.
  • For the Azure client used in the Aure cloud account the following API permission has to be provided:
    • Microsoft Graph: Group.Read.All (Application Type)
    • Microsoft Graph: Directory.Read.All (Application Type)

These permissions can be configured from the Azure cloud console under App registrations > API permissions for the specified App

To create an Azure cloud account, we would need:

• Client ID
• Tenant ID
• Client secret

For this, we first need to create an Azure Active Directory (AAD) Application which can be used with role-based access control. Follow the steps below to create a new AAD application, assign roles and create the client secret:

• Follow the steps described here to create a new Azure Active Directory application. Note down your ClientID and TenantID .
• On creating the application, a minimum required ContributorRole needs to be assigned. To assign any kind of role, the user must have a minimum role of UserAccessAdministrator. The role can be assigned by following the Assign Role To Application link.
• Follow the steps described in the Create an Application Secret section to create the client application secret. Store the Client Secret safely as it will not be available as plain text later.

The following steps need to be performed to provision a new AKS cluster:

• Provide the basic cluster information like name, description, and tags.
• Select a cluster profile created for the AKS Cluster. The profile definition will be used as the cluster construction template.
• Review and override pack parameters as desired. By default, parameters for all packs are set with values defined in the cluster profile.
• Provide the Azure Cloud account and placement information.
  • Cloud Account - Select the desired cloud account. Azure cloud accounts with credentials need to be pre-configured in project settings.
  • Subscription - Select the subscription which is to be used to access Azure Services.
  • Region - Select a region in Azure in which the cluster should be deployed.
  • Resource Group - Select the resource group in which the cluster should be deployed.
  • SSH Key - Public key to configure remote SSH access to the nodes.
  • Placement - If the choice of placement is Static then select
    • Virtual Network
    • Control Plane Subnet
    • Worker Subnet
• Configure the worker node pools. A worker node pool is configured by default.
  • Name - A descriptive name for the node pool.
  • Size - Number of nodes to be provisioned for the node pool.
  • Instance Type - Select the Azure instance type to be used for all the nodes in the pool.
  • Managed Disk - Select the managed disk type to be used.
  • Disk Size - Storage disk size in GB to be attached to the node.
  • Optionally select the system node pool.
  • Availability Zones (if any) - Choose one or more availability zones. Spectro Cloud provides fault tolerance to guard against failures like hardware failures, network failures, etc. by provisioning nodes across availability zones if multiple zones are selected. Zones are supported only for worker pools.

• Set schedules of OS Patching, Scans, or backup and recovery as per user choice.
• Review the settings and deploy the cluster. Provisioning status with details of ongoing provisioning tasks is available to track progress.

New worker pools may be added if it desired to customize certain worker nodes to run specialized workloads. As an example, the default worker pool may be configured with the ‘Standard_D2_v2’ instance types for general-purpose workloads and another worker pool with instance type ‘Standard_NC12s_v3’ can be configured to run GPU workloads.