Reading Time: 10 minutesWhilst at KubeCon Atlanta, the Kubernetes project announced something significant: Ingress NGINX is being retired in March 2026. The project is winding down the controller due to insufficient maintainership and mounting technical debt. Since the announcement, I’ve been asked by a lot of people what this means for AKS users specifically. Read more
Reading Time: 5 minutesRecently while browsing through the Azure CLI extensions repo (yes, that’s how I spend my evenings), I stumbled across a pair of pull requests that made me sit up and pay attention. Azure is adding –enable-hosted-system to AKS Automatic, and honestly, this is the kind of feature that makes me excited about Read more
Reading Time: 6 minutesRecently I spotted something new in the AKS CLI preview. Flatcar showed up as a valid OS SKU for Linux node pools. As someone who’s been running AKS clusters for years, I was curious to see what this CNCF-backed immutable OS brings to the table, so I spun up a Read more
Reading Time: 5 minutesRecently, I was tasked with implementing distributed tracing for a microservices platform running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The requirements were clear: use Grafana Tempo for trace storage, Azure Blob Storage as the backend for cost-effectiveness, and ensure all connectivity remained private for security compliance. What started as a straightforward Read more
Reading Time: 3 minutesIf you have been following me for a while, you will know I am a big fan of Private AKS clusters. Keeping your API server off the public internet is one of the easiest wins for improving cluster security. The problem?Connecting to them has never been that smooth. With a Read more
Reading Time: 2 minutesIf you have been following my blog for a while you will know I like to keep up to date with all things AKS. Over the years I have built up a routine of checking the docs, scanning the release notes, and making sure I do not miss anything important. Read more
Reading Time: 2 minutesIntro I recently ran into capacity issues in Azure and saw firsthand how AKS VMSS node pools behave when you use deallocated nodes to speed up start-times. I’ll walk through the three node-pool zone models documented by Microsoft, then share what really happened in my setup and how I worked Read more
Reading Time: 6 minutesRecently, while catching up on the latest AKS release notes, I spotted a brand-new preview feature that promises to trim unnecessary CPU and memory usage from system add-ons: cost optimised add-on scaling.In a nutshell, Microsoft has wired the managed Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) into key AKS add-ons (think CoreDNS, Workload Read more
Reading Time: 4 minutesRecently while testing out the latest version of the aks-preview Azure CLI extension, I stumbled across a new preview feature: Managed Namespaces in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). At the time of writing, this feature hasn’t been officially documented by Microsoft, but you can already try it for yourself using the Read more
Reading Time: 5 minutesIf you’re running an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster, you know how critical it is to monitor your node pools, especially when they hit their maximum node count and can’t scale further. Recently, I faced the challenge of building an Azure alert that dynamically checks every node pool in an Read more