Limits and Quotas¶
AKS capacity planning fails when teams treat quotas as afterthoughts. Limits exist at the subscription, region, VM family, subnet, and Kubernetes design layers.
Topic/Command Groups¶
flowchart TD
A[Limits] --> B[Subscription Quota]
A --> C[VM Family]
A --> D[Subnet and IP]
A --> E[Node and Pod Scale]What to validate¶
- Subscription and regional core quota for the VM family you intend to use.
- Subnet size and IP headroom for your chosen AKS networking model.
- Service, load balancer, and public IP dependencies in the node resource group.
- Supported node and pod scale boundaries for your cluster design and CNI mode.
Useful checks¶
az vm list-usage --location $LOCATION --output table
az aks show --resource-group $RG --name $CLUSTER_NAME --query networkProfile --output yaml
az network vnet subnet show --resource-group <network-rg> --vnet-name <vnet-name> --name <subnet-name> --output yaml
| Command | Purpose |
|---|---|
az vm list-usage | Show regional vCPU quota usage. |
--location | Azure region to query. |
--output | Output format for the result. |
az aks show | Show the cluster network profile. |
--resource-group | Resource group that contains the AKS cluster. |
--name | Name of the AKS cluster. |
--query | Selects the network profile. |
--output | Output format for the result. |
az network vnet subnet show | Show the subnet address plan. |
--resource-group | Resource group that contains the virtual network. |
--vnet-name | Name of the virtual network. |
--name | Name of the subnet. |
--output | Output format for the result. |
Usage Notes¶
- Treat official limits as moving targets; verify current Microsoft documentation before major expansion.
- The most common real-world blockers are quota exhaustion and subnet exhaustion, not theoretical Kubernetes maxima.