Installing the Dapr extension for Azure Kubernetes Service with Terraform

An easier way to configure Dapr on your AKS cluster

As part of the AKS cluster that I’m building for my personal development, I decided it be worthwhile installing the Dapr extension on my cluster. AKS extensions provide an Azure Resource Manager driven experience for installing and managing different services like Dapr on your cluster.

Since I built my cluster using Terraform, I decided to configure the Dapr extension using Terraform as well. In this article, I’ll talk about how we can configure our AKS cluster so that we can install extensions on it, How the Dapr cluster extension works, and then I’ll explain how we can configure our Dapr extension in Terraform.

Configuring our AKS Cluster to install extensions.

The first thing that we’ll need to to do is ensure that our AKS cluster has a managed identity. Cluster extensions won’t work with service-principal based clusters.

In Terraform, we can create our AKS cluster with a managed identity like so:

resource "azurerm_kubernetes_cluster" "aks" {
  name = var.aks_name
  location = var.location
  resource_group_name = var.rg_name
  dns_prefix = var.aks_name…