Azure Kubernetes Service Plans Pricing
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) charges only for the cluster control plane on the Standard and Premium tiers (Free tier is no-cost) plus the underlying VM, storage, and networking. Customers always pay for the agent-node VMs, OS disks, persistent volumes, load balancers, and egress regardless of tier. The Free tier offers best-effort uptime; Standard and Premium include a financially-backed uptime SLA (99.9% / 99.95%). Premium adds 24-month Long-Term Support (LTS) for regulated environments.
Plans
Free cluster management (no SLA) for dev/test, learning, and small-scale workloads. Best-effort uptime; recommended for less than 10 nodes.
- All AKS features
- No uptime SLA
- Recommended < 10 nodes
Production workloads. 99.9% (no AZ) / 99.95% (with AZ) Kubernetes API server uptime SLA. Auto-scales control plane components. Up to 5,000 nodes per cluster.
- All Free features
- 99.9% / 99.95% Uptime SLA
- Auto-scaling control plane
- Up to 5,000 nodes / cluster
Standard plus Microsoft maintenance past community support (Long-Term Support, 2-year Kubernetes version support) for regulated environments.
- All Standard features
- 24-month Long-Term Support (LTS)
- Premium uplift on per-cluster-hour rate