AKS Cluster Management

Platform9 can easily connect to Azure and import existing AKS clusters, bringing them under management of Platform9 to enable centralized administration. Once a cluster has been imported and the External Cluster Operator has been installed Platform9 enables:

• View AKS clusters alongside BareOS, Azure Native Clusters and AWS Native Clusters
• View and Edit RBAC configuration
• View and Manage Cluster Workloads
• Use the Application Catalog to deploy Helm 3 applications
• Deploy Platform9 Monitoring

Import an AKS Cluster

To import an AKS cluster, clients must first create a Service Principal for Platform9 in Azure and grant the Service Principal access to each AKS cluster. Once the Service Principal is set up correctly, clients can then create an Azure Cloud Provider within Platform9. Once the Cloud provider has been added, clients can import any AKS cluster that the Service Principal has access to.

Steps to Import an AKS Cluster

1. Within Azure, Create a Service Principal with Contributor Role for Platform9
2. Grant the Service Principal access to each AKS cluster
3. Log into Platform9 and navigate to Infrastructure ⇾ Cloud Providers tab
4. On the Cloud Providers tab, click “+ Add Cloud Provider”
5. Then, provide a Name for the Cloud Provider and the Azure account details for the Service Principal and click next
6. Once the Cloud Provider has been validated, clients can save the credentials to Platform9
7. Validate the Cloud Provider has access to the regions you are running the AKS clusters in, and then click 'Done'
8. Next, navigate to the Infrastructure ⇾ Clusters tab and select 'Import' from the Add Cluster button
9. Select Azure as the target cloud and click 'Import AKS Cluster'
10. Select the Cloud Provider configured with AKS Cluster Access and click 'Next'
11. Select each region where the AKS clusters are running, and then select each cluster to be imported. Several clusters can be imported in one action. Once all clusters are selected, click 'Next'
12. Review the final list for import and click 'Import'
13. 1. IMPORTANT: ECO must be installed into each cluster after import to ensure that Platform9 can communicate with the clusters API server
14. Install ECO for each imported cluster

Installing ECO

To connect to the external clusters API Server the Platform9 External Cluster Operator must be installed. This can only be done after the cluster has been imported.

1. Once the external cluster import is complete, click Install ECO on the Imported cluster table or select the cluster via the radio checkbox and click edit
2. On the External Cluster Operator tab, download the YAML and save to your client machine. Then, use Kubectl apply -f <fileLocation>/<fileName> to install ECO
3. The status of ECO will refresh once all ECO components are installed

Conclusion

Should you encounter any difficulties adopting or deploying the information noted above, our talented and responsive support team is available 24/7/365 to provide any additional assistance needed.