Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
Run and scale open models on managed Kubernetes clusters with Azure GPU nodes.
Overview
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is Microsoft's managed Kubernetes service. It's a common way to serve open models at scale with servers like vLLM, adding GPU nodes as traffic grows. You pay for the GPU virtual machines per hour; the standard cluster management tier adds a small hourly fee.
Specifications
| Hosting type | GPU cloud |
|---|---|
| Model families | gpt-oss, Qwen, DeepSeek, Llama, Gemma, Mistral |
| LLM models | gpt-oss-120b, Qwen2.5 72B Instruct, DeepSeek-V3, Llama 3.3 70B Instruct, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct, gpt-oss-20b, Gemma 3 27B, Gemma 3 12B, Gemma 3 4B, Gemma 2 27B, Gemma 2 9B, Qwen3 30B-A3B, Qwen3 32B, Qwen3 235B-A22B, Qwen2.5-Coder 32B Instruct, DeepSeek-V3.1, DeepSeek-R1, Codestral 22B, Mistral Small 3.1, Mistral NeMo |
| Pricing range | From US$0.526 |
| Pricing model | Per GPU-hour, Reserved or committed capacity |
| Free tier available | No |
| Data center locations | United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Ireland, Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Italy, Spain, Israel, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, South Africa, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong SAR China, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand |
| Hardware / GPU options | NCasT4_v3 (NVIDIA T4), NVadsA10 v5 (A10), NC A100 v4 (A100), NC H100 v5 and ND H100 v5 (H100), ND H200 v5 (H200), ND GB200 v6 (GB200) and ND MI300X v5 (AMD MI300X) virtual machines. |
| VRAM & memory | 16 GB – 192 GB |
| Maximum model size | 671B |
| OpenAI-compatible API | No |