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AZ-900 Practice Question 66: AKS Control Plane Billing

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) · Test 7 · question 6 of 10

Azure Architecturemedium

A platform team creates a new AKS cluster on the default Free pricing tier for a low-traffic internal tool, accepting that the Kubernetes API server has no financially backed uptime SLA. Once the cluster is running, what will the team be billed for?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • C. Nothing for the control plane itself on the Free tier; only the agent node VMs in the node pools are billed, and choosing Standard or Premium instead would add an hourly control-plane fee

AKS cluster management has three pricing tiers. On the Free tier, Azure runs the control plane (API server, scheduler, etcd) at no charge, and the team pays only for the agent nodes, which are ordinary billed Azure VMs. The Standard tier (roughly $0.10/cluster/hour) adds a financially backed uptime SLA and is the default for AKS Automatic; Premium (roughly $0.60/cluster/hour) adds long-term support. So the control plane is only free on the tier this scenario explicitly chose; picking Standard or Premium instead means paying an hourly fee for it.

Option A is wrong because it applies a charge to every tier, when the Free tier this team chose carries no control-plane fee at all. Option B is wrong because nodes are never bundled into a flat fee; every agent node is billed like any other VM, and cost scales with however many nodes the cluster runs. Option D is wrong because AKS doesn't require a container registry at all, and Azure Container Registry, when used, is a separate resource billed on its own; it has nothing to do with recovering AKS's cost.

Reference: AKS pricing tiers for cluster management

Practice Test 7 ›

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