Azure Kubernetes Service Engineering - Clusters, networking, ingress, GitOps, observability, and multi-tenant Kubernetes at scale. #1007507

Azure Kubernetes Service is a managed Kubernetes control plane. Microsoft runs the API server, the scheduler, the controller manager, and etcd; you run the worker nodes and the workloads that live on them. That split is the entire product. Everything AKS does well — automatic upgrades, integrated identity, managed networking, patch automation — flows from Microsoft owning the control plane. Everything AKS does not do — node sizing, pod density, workload design — flows from you owning the nodes.

Azure Kubernetes Service Engineering is the platform engineer's guide to the second half.

You'll go from the cluster model — node pools, kubectl, workload types — into networking and ingress: CNI choices, network policy, ingress controllers, Gateway API, and service mesh with mTLS. Part III covers operations and reliability: observability with Prometheus and Fluent Bit, the four autoscaling mechanisms (HPA, VPA, KEDA, Cluster Autoscaler), security with RBAC and Workload Identity, and GitOps with Flux and Argo CD. Part IV is production at scale: multi-tenancy isolation, cost engineering, and three closing case studies — the internal platform, the monolith migration, and the ML platform.