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System requirements and prerequisites (preview)

Important

Azure Kubernetes Service on bare metal is currently in preview. See the Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews for legal terms that apply to Azure features that are in beta, preview, or otherwise not yet released into general availability. Azure Kubernetes Service on bare metal previews are partially covered by customer support on a best-effort basis.

This article describes the hardware, network, and Azure requirements for deploying Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on bare metal.

Hardware requirements

Use one of the supported devices for small form factor deployments of Azure Local.

Network requirements

Outbound internet connectivity

The bare metal host requires outbound internet access to the following endpoints:

Endpoint Purpose
*.arc.azure.net Azure Arc connectivity
management.azure.com Azure Resource Manager
login.microsoftonline.com Microsoft Entra authentication
mcr.microsoft.com Container image pulls
*.data.mcr.microsoft.com Container image data
guestnotificationservice.azure.com Arc guest notifications

IP address planning

You need one IP address planned before deployment:

IP type Purpose Notes
Control plane IP Kubernetes API server endpoint Must be in the same subnet as the host or match the host IP

Azure prerequisites

Subscription and permissions

Requirement Details
Azure subscription Active subscription with billing enabled
Region East US (only supported region for public preview)
Role Owner or Contributor + User Access Administrator on the resource group
Role assignment status Must be both Active and Permanent
Resource providers Microsoft.HybridCompute, Microsoft.HybridContainerService, Microsoft.Kubernetes, Microsoft.ExtendedLocation must be registered

Important

If your role assignment isn't active and permanent, you might need to temporarily elevate your permissions before running deployment commands.

Register resource providers

Ensure Azure CLI is installed and signed in.

az provider register --namespace Microsoft.HybridCompute
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.HybridContainerService
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.Kubernetes
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.ExtendedLocation

Azure CLI extensions

Install the required CLI extensions:

az extension add --name connectedk8s

Note

The connectedk8s extension is required to connect to your cluster after deployment using az connectedk8s proxy.

Arc-enabled machine

Before deploying an AKS cluster, you must have a small form factor Azure Local device set up by following the Azure Local documentation.

Entra ID requirements

To use Azure RBAC for cluster access:

Requirement Details
Entra ID group A security group containing users who need cluster admin access
Group object ID The object ID of the Entra ID group (found in Azure portal → Entra ID → Groups)

Next steps