Limits and Quotas¶

AKS capacity planning fails when teams treat quotas as afterthoughts. Limits exist at the subscription, region, VM family, subnet, and Kubernetes design layers.

Topic/Command Groups¶

flowchart TD
    A[Limits] --> B[Subscription Quota]
    A --> C[VM Family]
    A --> D[Subnet and IP]
    A --> E[Node and Pod Scale]

What to validate¶

• Subscription and regional core quota for the VM family you intend to use.
• Subnet size and IP headroom for your chosen AKS networking model.
• Service, load balancer, and public IP dependencies in the node resource group.
• Supported node and pod scale boundaries for your cluster design and CNI mode.

Useful checks¶

az vm list-usage --location $LOCATION --output table
az aks show --resource-group $RG --name $CLUSTER_NAME --query networkProfile --output yaml
az network vnet subnet show --resource-group <network-rg> --vnet-name <vnet-name> --name <subnet-name> --output yaml

Usage Notes¶

• Treat official limits as moving targets; verify current Microsoft documentation before major expansion.
• The most common real-world blockers are quota exhaustion and subnet exhaustion, not theoretical Kubernetes maxima.

See Also¶

• Networking Models
• Cost Optimization
• CNI IP Exhaustion

Sources¶

• AKS quotas, virtual machine sizes, and regional availability
• Azure subscription and service limits, quotas, and constraints