Azure

This vendor-provided document has not been tested on the Istio 1.9 release and may contain bugs.

Follow these instructions to prepare an Azure cluster for Istio.

You can deploy a Kubernetes cluster to Azure via or AKS-Engine which fully supports Istio.

You can create an AKS cluster via or the Azure portal.

For the cli option, complete az login authentication OR use cloud shell, then run the following commands below.

Determine the desired region name which supports AKS
Replace my location using the desired region value from the above step, and then execute:
```
$ az aks get-versions --location "my location" --query "orchestrators[].orchestratorVersion"
```
Ensure a minimum of 1.10.5 is listed.
Get the AKS kubeconfig credentials

Replace myResourceGroup and with the names from the previous step and execute:
```
$ az aks get-credentials --resource-group myResourceGroup --name myAKSCluster
```

AKS-Engine

Download the aks-engine API model definition that supports deploying Istio:

Note: It is possible to use other api model definitions which will work with Istio. The MutatingAdmissionWebhook and ValidatingAdmissionWebhook admission control flags and RBAC are enabled by default. See for further information.
Deploy your cluster using the istio.json template. You can find references to the parameters in the official docs.
```
  --dns-prefix <dns_prefix> --location <location> --auto-suffix \
  --api-model istio.json
```
After a few minutes, you can find your cluster on your Azure subscription in a resource group called . Assuming dns_prefix has the value myclustername, a valid resource group with a unique cluster ID is mycluster-5adfba82. The aks-engine generates your kubeconfig file in the _output folder.
Use the <dns_prefix>-<id> cluster ID, to copy your kubeconfig to your machine from the _output folder:

For example:
```
$ cp _output/mycluster-5adfba82/kubeconfig/kubeconfig.westus2.json \
```