Streamlining the User Experience for Accessing AKS Clusters
Lately I’ve been spending a little bit of time building Pulumi programs to assist with standing up Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters. I’ve learned a pretty fair amount about Azure and AKS along the way, as expected, but I was taken aback by the poor user experience (in my opinion) when it came to accessing the AKS clusters once they’d been established. In this post, I’ll share a small tweak you can make that will, in most cases, make accessing your AKS clusters a great deal smoother.
What do I mean by “poor user experience”? In the same vein as comparable offerings from AWS (EKS) and Google Cloud (GKE), AKS leverages Azure’s identity and access management (IAM) functionality, so that users have a single place to manage user and group entities. This makes perfect sense! What doesn’t make sense to me, though, is the requirement that users must perform a separate login process to gain access to the cluster, even if the user is already authenticated via the Azure CLI. This is very counter to both EKS and GKE, where—if you are already authenticated via their CLI tools—no additional steps are necessary to access appropriately-configured managed Kubernetes clusters on their Continue reading










