Kubernetes on Azure for Production Teams: The Gates That Separate a Demo Cluster From a Real Platform

AKS is easy to spin up and hard to run in production. The pattern that holds up: identity and network on day one, workload onboarding rules on day two, cost and operations on day three. None of it is optional.

Why most teams stall going to production with AKS

Three production-readiness gates

A Terraform skeleton with the right defaults

How the cluster fits the rest of the landing zone

When AKS is the wrong choice

What this looks like in practice