Azure used to have its own container management service. You could use the Mesos-based DC/OS or Docker Swarm to manage them, but you could also use Kubernetes, of course. You could also provision the cluster yourself (for example, using Azure's desired-state configuration) then create the Kubernetes cluster using kubeadm. The recommended approach used to be to use yet another non-core Kubernetes project called kubernetes-anywhere (http://bit.ly/2eCS7Ps). The goal of kubernetes-anywhere is to provide a cross-platform way to create clusters in a cloud environment (at least for GCP, AWS, and Azure).

The process is pretty painless. You need to have Docker, make, and kubectl installed, and of course, your Azure subscription ID. Then, you clone the kubernetes-anywhere repository, run a couple of make commands, and your cluster is good to go.

The complete instructions to create an Azure cluster are at http://bit.ly/2d56WdA.

However, in the second half of 2017, Azure jumped on the Kubernetes bandwagon too and introduced AKS-Azure Container Service. It is similar to Amazon EKS, although it's a little further ahead in its implementation.

AKS provides a REST API, as well as a CLI, to manage your Kubernetes cluster, but you can use kubectl and any other Kubernetes tooling directly.

Here are some of the benefits of using AKS:

• Automated Kubernetes version upgrades and patching
• Easy cluster scaling
• Self-healing hosted control plane (masters)
• Cost savings—pay only for running agent pool nodes

In this section, we covered the cloud-provider interface and looked at the various recommended ways to create Kubernetes clusters on various cloud providers. The scene is still young and the tools evolving quickly. I believe convergence will happen soon. Tools and projects such as kubeadm, kops, Kargo, and kubernetes-anywhere will eventually merge and provide a uniform and easy way to bootstrap Kubernetes clusters.