You can connect to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) nodes using ssh. It is documented here: Connect with SSH to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster nodes for maintenance or troubleshooting. I needed to access nodes on the System node pool for collecting some logs recently, but the process documented above was not working for me. It turns out that there were two different issues, both related to adding your SSH keys to the nodes in a virtual machine scale set (VMSS). This is the az cli command that adds the ssh keys to the VMSS: I was running this command from powershell on a windows host. So, the first modification I needed was to escape the double quotes by doubling them. […]