AKS-managed Azure AD : How to integrate your AKS cluster with Azure AD

AKS is evolving at a dizzying pace and there have been quite  a number of changes since I wrote about AKS namespace isolation and AAD integration . The major update is in terms of creating and Azure AD integrated AKS cluster. You no longer need to create and manage the server and client application, it is handled by the AKS resource provider. 

There are few limitations with this approach though before you get started

  - You cannot disable the AKS-managed Azure AD integration once it is enabled

  - Process is supported only for RBAC enabled clusters

  - Azure AD tenant once integrated cannot be switched to a different one

Lets start with creating an Azure AD group. You can also use an existing one if you want to. Note that creating an Azure AD group would need Global administrator rights

I am executing these steps from Azure cloud shell, where all the required tools like Azure CLI and Kubectl are preinstalled

1. Create the Azure AD group for your cluster administrators. Note down the object id of the group as it is required during cluster provisioning

~$ az ad group create --display-name AKSdemoadminGroup --mail-nickname AKSdemoadmingroup

Note: Once the AD group is created, add the users who will have cluster admin rights to this group

2. Note down the tenant id of your Azure AD. You can get this from Azure portal-> Azure active directory->overview->Tenant information. 

3. Create resource group for the AKS cluster

$ az group create --name demoaksgroup --location  EastUS

4. Create AKS cluster , the object id of the AD group that we created in step 1 and the AD tenant id that was copied in step 2 will be used here

az aks create -g demoaksgroup -n demoaks1  --enable-aad --aad-admin-group-object-ids <AD group obejct ID> --aad-tenant-id <Azure AD tenant ID> --generate-ssh-keys

5. Login to cluster using an user account that is part of cluster admin AD group that was used for the integration. When prompted, login using the Azure AD credentials . 

az aks get-credentials --resource-group demoaksgroup --name demoaks1

In the above example I am executing the "kubectl get nodes" and "kubectl get namespaces" commands after authenticating 

Now you can go ahead and follow the steps in my earlier blog  to setup RBAC for  namespaces using Azure AD credentials