Azure AKS Best Practices from Managing 100+ Microservices in Production

Running 100+ microservices on Azure Kubernetes Service teaches you things no documentation ever will. After 2+ years operating multi-cluster AKS environments at enterprise scale, here are the patterns that keep our services running at 99.9% uptime — and the mistakes that almost took us down. 1. Cluster Architecture: Don't Put Everything in One Basket The Mistake Starting with one massive cluster for everything — dev, staging, production, monitoring, all in one place. The Pattern ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ PRODUCTION │ │ ┌──────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ │ │ │ System Pool │ │ App Pool 1 │ (General) │ │ │ (3 nodes) │ │ (5-20 nodes)│ │ │ │ CriticalOnly │ │ Auto-scale │ │ │ └──────────────┘ └──────────────┘ │ │ ┌──────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ │ │ │ App Pool 2 │ │ Spot Pool │ (Batch jobs) │ │ │ (GPU/Memory)│ │ (Cost-opt) │ │ │ └──────────────┘ └──────────────┘ │ ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤ │ NON-PROD │ │ ┌──────────────┐ ┌────────