Azure Kubernetes Service · Rate Limits

Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service Rate Limits

AKS exposes two distinct API surfaces - the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) plane for cluster management (provisioning, scaling, upgrades) and the Kubernetes API server inside each cluster. ARM has its own per-subscription rate limits; the Kubernetes API server's limits depend on tier (Free vs Standard/Premium SLA) and cluster size. Premium adds priority and fairness controls.

Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for Azure Kubernetes Service on the APIs.io network, in the API Commons Rate Limits shape.

It captures 8 rate-limit definitions, measuring requests_per_hour, availability, queries_per_second, pods, and nodes.

Limit state is signalled in the retryAfter and rateLimitRemaining response headers, and an exhausted limit returns HTTP 429.

This profile was written by API Evangelist and has not been verified against a page the provider published; treat every limit as unconfirmed until a dated transcription replaces it.

The profile also includes 4 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled.

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, Kubernetes, and Microsoft Azure.

8 Limits Exhausted: HTTP 429 retryAfterrateLimitRemaining
Method: generated, dated 2026-05-05.
Written by API Evangelist on 2026-05-05 and not verified against a page the provider published. Treat every limit as unconfirmed until a dated transcription replaces it.
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Rate LimitingKubernetesMicrosoft Azure

Limits

ARM read requests per subscription per hour subscription
requests_per_hour · hour
12000
Apply to AKS provisioning and management API calls.
ARM write requests per subscription per hour subscription
requests_per_hour · hour
1200
Free tier API server availability cluster
availability
best-effort, no SLA
Standard tier API server availability cluster
availability
99.95% (with AZ) / 99.9% (without AZ)
Premium tier API server availability cluster
availability
99.95% (with AZ) / 99.9% (without AZ)
Per-cluster API server QPS cluster
queries_per_second
see cluster API server flow control / max-mutating-requests-inflight; 200/400 default
Pods per cluster cluster
pods
5000
Nodes per cluster cluster
nodes
5000

Policies

ARM throttling
Honor x-ms-ratelimit-* headers and Retry-After when ARM throttles cluster-management calls; back off exponentially.
Kubernetes priority and fairness
API server uses APF (API Priority and Fairness) to throttle kubectl/controllers under load; tune flow schemas for noisy controllers.
Use AKS Cluster Autoscaler / Karpenter
Avoid hand-rolled scale-out controllers that hammer the API server; use the platform autoscalers.
Watch over poll
Prefer informers and watches over polling list endpoints to reduce API-server load.

Sources

Work with this as data

Every rate limit here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.

MCP server

One button, every client — Claude, Cursor, VS Code and the rest.

https://apis.io/mcp

Tools for rate limits

4 MCP tools reach this
  • find_rate_limitsBrowse and filter every rate limit in the catalog.
  • apis_io_searchSTART HERE — APIs, providers and tags for one query, each with its total.
  • resolveTurn a domain, URL or GitHub org into the provider it belongs to.
  • find_cohortsEvery scored population of providers in the catalog.
All 92 tools →

Call it yourself

curl for this page
This rate limit 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits/microsoft-azure-kubernetes-service-rate-limits"
All rate limits 
curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/rate-limits?limit=25"

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