Tutorial: Add an Azure Linux node pool to your existing AKS cluster

In AKS, nodes with the same configurations are grouped together into node pools. Each pool contains the VMs that run your applications. In the previous tutorial, you created an Azure Linux Container Host cluster with a single node pool. To meet the varying compute or storage requirements of your applications, you can create additional user node pools.

In this tutorial, part two of five, you learn how to:

In later tutorials, you learn how to migrate nodes to Azure Linux and enable telemetry to monitor your clusters.

Prerequisites

• In the previous tutorial, you created and deployed an Azure Linux Container Host cluster. If you haven't done these steps and would like to follow along, start with Tutorial 1: Create a cluster with the Azure Linux Container Host for AKS.
• You need the latest version of Azure CLI. Run az --version to find the version. If you need to install or upgrade, see Install Azure CLI.

Add an Azure Linux node pool

To add an Azure Linux node pool into your existing cluster, use the az aks nodepool add command and specify --os-sku AzureLinux. The following example creates a node pool named ALnodepool that runs three nodes in the testAzureLinuxCluster cluster in the testAzureLinuxResourceGroup resource group. Environment variables are declared below and a random suffix is appended to the resource group and cluster names to ensure uniqueness.

export RANDOM_SUFFIX=$(openssl rand -hex 3)
export NODEPOOL_NAME="np$RANDOM_SUFFIX"

az aks nodepool add \
    --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP \
    --cluster-name $CLUSTER_NAME \
    --name $NODEPOOL_NAME \
    --node-count 3 \
    --os-sku AzureLinux

{
  "agentPoolType": "VirtualMachineScaleSets",
  "count": 3,
  "name": "alnodepool",
  "osType": "Linux",
  "provisioningState": "Succeeded",
  "resourceGroup": "testAzureLinuxResourceGroupxxxxx",
  "type": "Microsoft.ContainerService/managedClusters/agentPools"
}

Check the node pool status

To see the status of your node pools, use the az aks nodepool list command and specify your resource group and cluster name. The same environment variable values declared earlier are used here.

az aks nodepool list --resource-group $RESOURCE_GROUP --cluster-name $CLUSTER_NAME

[
  {
    "agentPoolType": "VirtualMachineScaleSets",
    "availabilityZones": null,
    "count": 1,
    "enableAutoScaling": false,
    "enableEncryptionAtHost": false,
    "enableFips": false,
    "enableNodePublicIp": false,
    "id": "/subscriptions/REDACTED/resourcegroups/myAKSResourceGroupxxxxx/providers/Microsoft.ContainerService/managedClusters/myAKSClusterxxxxx/agentPools/nodepoolx",
    "maxPods": 110,
    "mode": "System",
    "name": "nodepoolx",
    "nodeImageVersion": "AKSUbuntu-1804gen2containerd-2023.06.06",
    "orchestratorVersion": "1.25.6",
    "osDiskSizeGb": 128,
    "osDiskType": "Managed",
    "osSku": "Ubuntu",
    "osType": "Linux",
    "powerState": {
      "code": "Running"
    },
    "provisioningState": "Succeeded",
    "resourceGroup": "myAKSResourceGroupxxxxx",
    "type": "Microsoft.ContainerService/managedClusters/agentPools",
    "vmSize": "Standard_DS2_v2"
  },
  {
    "agentPoolType": "VirtualMachineScaleSets",
    "availabilityZones": null,
    "count": 3,
    "enableAutoScaling": false,
    "enableEncryptionAtHost": false,
    "enableFips": false,
    "enableNodePublicIp": false,
    "id": "/subscriptions/REDACTED/resourcegroups/myAKSResourceGroupxxxxx/providers/Microsoft.ContainerService/managedClusters/myAKSClusterxxxxx/agentPools/npxxxxxx",
    "maxPods": 110,
    "mode": "User",
    "name": "npxxxxxx",
    "nodeImageVersion": "AzureLinuxContainerHost-2023.06.06",
    "orchestratorVersion": "1.25.6",
    "osDiskSizeGb": 128,
    "osDiskType": "Managed",
    "osSku": "AzureLinux",
    "osType": "Linux",
    "powerState": {
      "code": "Running"
    },
    "provisioningState": "Succeeded",
    "resourceGroup": "myAKSResourceGroupxxxxx",
    "type": "Microsoft.ContainerService/managedClusters/agentPools",
    "vmSize": "Standard_DS2_v2"
  }
]

Next steps

In this tutorial, you added an Azure Linux node pool to your existing cluster. You learned how to:

In the next tutorial, you learn how to migrate existing nodes to Azure Linux.