We’re excited to announce the topics and speakers for .NET Conf: Focus on Modernization, our latest virtual event on April 22-23, 2025! This event...

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Azure PaaS handles 80% of the requirements I see in production environments. So why would you need AKS? AKS makes sense for genuinely demanding scenarios. Multi-cloud portability where the abstraction has real business value, not just "we might leave Azure one day." Advanced service mesh requirements that App Service or Container Apps can't deliver. A dedicated platform engineering team with the capacity to run it properly. Workloads that genuinely need fine-grained control over scheduling, networking, and runtime that PaaS abstracts away. If your environment doesn't have at least two of those, you're probably solving for an architecture you don't have. Azure PaaS is pragmatic for everything else. Standard web apps. Event-driven architectures. Small teams without a dedicated platform function. Organisations where cost predictability matters more than maximum flexibility. Container Apps, App Service, Functions, Logic Apps, Service Bus — these aren't compromise choices. For most workloads, they're the right architectural fit and the wrong reason to skip past them is "it's not cool enough." The Azure Pricing Calculator has a sample AKS workload that is a great starting point for estimating your cluster and associated workloads, what it doesn't give you is: ❌ Managing cluster upgrade cycles. ❌ Monitoring and observability setup. ❌ Security patching at the node, container image, and runtime layers. ❌ RBAC complexity. Azure RBAC, Kubernetes RBAC, namespace boundaries. ❌ A platform team of 3-5 FTEs minimum to run it properly. ❌ How this fits into your operating model. For me, the answer is simple. Start with PaaS. Graduate to AKS only when a specific workload requirement forces the upgrade AND you have the capability to support it. I spoke about this at conferences in the past and will be again this year. YouTube recording link is in the comments. If you're running AKS in production right now, can you defend the choice on workload requirements alone, or could your workloads have run on Azure PaaS services and you just wanted an AKS cluster because "it's cool"? #Azure #AKS #AzurePaaS #CloudArchitecture #PlatformEngineering #MVPbuzz