Upgrading the cluster

In order to run your cluster over long periods of time, you'll need to update your cluster as needed. There are several ways to manage cluster upgrades, and the difficulty level of the upgrades is determined by the platform you've chosen previously. As a general rule, hosted Platform as a service (PaaS) options are simpler, while roll your own options rely on you to manage your cluster upgrades.

Upgrading PaaS clusters

Upgrading PaaS clusters is a lot simpler than updating your hand-rolled clusters. Let's check out how the major cloud service providers update their hosted Kubernetes platforms.

With Azure, it's relatively straightforward to manage an upgrade of both the control plane and nodes of your cluster. You can check which upgrades are available for your cluster with the following command:

az aks get-upgrades --name “myAKSCluster” --resource-group myResourceGroup --output table
Name ResourceGroup MasterVersion NodePoolVersion Upgrades

------- --------------- ---...