Hi,

In this article I would like to share with you how you can reduce the latency between your AKS nodes with the proximity placement groups features.

Before to start, let me redefine what is a proximity placement group?

A proximity placement group is a logical grouping used to make sure Azure compute resources are physically located close to each other.

Few limitations to know:

• A proximity placement group can map to at most one availability zone.
• A node pool must use Virtual Machine Scale Sets to associate a proximity placement group.
• A node pool can associate a proximity placement group at node pool create time only.

Create a new cluster AKS cluster with a Proximity Placement Group:

Create an Azure resource group

az group create --name myResourceGroup --location canadacentral

Create proximity placement group

az ppg create -n myPPG -g myResourceGroup -l canadacentral -t standard

Create an AKS cluster that uses a proximity placement group for the initial system node pool only. The PPG has no effect on the cluster control plane.

az aks create \
--resource-group myResourceGroup \
--name myAKSCluster \
--ppg myPPGResourceID

Add a new node pool that uses a proximity placement group, use a --node-count = 1 for testing

az aks nodepool add \
--resource-group myResourceGroup \
--cluster-name myAKSCluster \
--name mynodepool \
--node-count 1 \
--ppg myPPGResourceID

Maxime.