Azure Provider

The Azure provider creates managed Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters via the Azure SDK. It is the only provider available for the AKS distribution.

Prerequisites

Azure subscription — with permissions to create AKS clusters and their managed infrastructure
Azure credentials — resolved via the Azure SDK’s DefaultAzureCredential chain (environment variables, managed identity, workload identity, or Azure CLI login):
Terminal window
```
az login
# or service-principal environment variables:
export AZURE_CLIENT_ID=...
export AZURE_TENANT_ID=...
export AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET=...
```
Subscription and resource group — exported in the environment:
Terminal window
```
export AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
export AZURE_RESOURCE_GROUP=my-resource-group
```
Creating a cluster requires the resource group. For operations on an existing cluster — read-only ones (list, info) and lifecycle ones (start, stop, delete) — KSail can resolve the resource group from the cluster’s ARM ID via a subscription-wide search when the variable is unset.
Docker — required locally for the ksail CLI

Configuration

ksail.yaml Reference

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/devantler-tech/ksail/main/schemas/ksail-config.schema.json
apiVersion: ksail.io/v1alpha1
kind: Cluster
metadata:
  name: aks-default
spec:
  cluster:
    distribution: AKS
    provider: Azure

By default KSail reads the subscription from AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID and the resource group from AZURE_RESOURCE_GROUP. If your environment uses different variable names, point KSail at them:

spec:
  provider:
    azure:
      subscriptionIdEnvVar: MY_SUBSCRIPTION_VAR # defaults to AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID
      resourceGroupEnvVar: MY_RESOURCE_GROUP_VAR # defaults to AZURE_RESOURCE_GROUP

The cluster shape (agent pools, versions, networking) lives in aks.yaml — see the AKS distribution guide for the configuration reference.

Characteristics

Property	Value
Supported distribution	AKS
Infrastructure type	Cloud (managed Microsoft Azure)
Local registries	❌ Not supported
Local mirrors	❌ Not supported (use external URLs)
CNI	Azure CNI (provided)
CSI	Azure Disk CSI driver (provided)
LoadBalancer support	Built-in (Azure-managed)
Start/Stop	AKS native cluster stop/start (deallocates the whole cluster, state kept)

Limitations

Cloud provider — local Docker containers (mirrors, registries) are inaccessible from the cluster
Only one distribution is supported: AKS
Cloud clusters incur Azure charges while running