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Azure Day with Kubernetes at KubeCon NA 2026: My AKS Highlights

Pixel Robots. — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 15:44:52 +0000

Reading Time: 11 minutesI spent the day before KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 at Azure Day with Kubernetes in Salt Lake City. It’s the AKS pre-day, and it’s always one of my favourite parts of the week. You get the product team in one room, a lot of slides, and the chance […]

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AKS Upgrade Insights Now in Preview

Pixel Robots. — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 14:16:58 +0000

Reading Time: 5 minutesI picked this one up via my AKS Docs Tracker over the weekend. A brand new article, Use the Upgrade Insights API in AKS (preview), appeared on Microsoft Learn, and it describes something I’ve wanted for a long time. A proper dry run for AKS upgrades. There’s a catch though. The docs tell […]

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Testing AKS Health-Aware Upgrade Gates in Preview

Pixel Robots. — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:07:44 +0000

Reading Time: 7 minutesI spotted this land in the aks-preview extension recently whilst keeping an eye on the AKS CLI pull requests. Azure/azure-cli-extensions#10448 adds --enable-upgrade-gate and --disable-upgrade-gate, and the description mentioned health-aware upgrades. That was enough for me to spin up a cluster and have a poke around. The idea is simple. AKS checks health signals from monitoring […]

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AKS Flex Nodes Are in Preview: Attaching Your Own Compute to a Managed Cluster

Pixel Robots. — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:52:33 +0000

Reading Time: 18 minutesMicrosoft has added flex nodes to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and it’s one of the more interesting preview features I’ve seen land in a while. I picked it up through the AKS docs, had to read it twice before it clicked, and then stood the whole thing up end to […]

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AKS Prepared Image Specification Is in Preview

Pixel Robots. — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:04:13 +0000

Reading Time: 7 minutesPrepared Image Specification (PIS) for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is in preview, and I’ve been putting it through its paces. The premise is straightforward. You pre-bake stable container images and host customisations into an AKS-managed node image so pods do not wait on every download when a new node boots. […]

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AKS Hyperscale Control Plane Now in Preview

Pixel Robots. — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 07:51:26 +0000

Reading Time: 4 minutesI spotted this land in the aks-preview extension recently. Microsoft has merged support for a control plane scaling profile into the AKS CLI, introducing what the API calls “hyperscale” control plane sizes. For the first time you can specify a control plane tier at cluster creation with guaranteed capacity and […]

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AKS Shared Maintenance Windows (Preview): One Schedule Across Multiple Clusters

Pixel Robots. — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:09:22 +0000

Reading Time: 3 minutesI picked this one up via the AKS Docs Tracker I run here. A new PR landed in the azure-aks-docs repo adding documentation for Shared Maintenance Windows, and it caught my attention straight away. If you’ve ever managed planned maintenance across more than a handful of AKS clusters, you’ll know […]

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AKS Automatic Pod Disruption Budget Management Is Now in Preview

Pixel Robots. — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:04:16 +0000

Reading Time: 9 minutesMicrosoft has shipped Automatic Pod Disruption Budget management for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). If you have ever sat watching an AKS upgrade stall because Kubernetes refused to evict a pod, this one is worth your attention. I have been on the wrong side of it more than once. AKS starts […]

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AKS Node Disruption Policy is Now in Preview: Control When Your Nodes Get Reimaged

Pixel Robots. — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:15:51 +0000

Reading Time: 5 minutesIf you have ever watched a routine cluster configuration change silently reimage your node pools mid-business-hours and wondered why you had no say in the matter, this feature is for you. Two PRs landed in the azure-cli-extensions repo recently that bring a new preview capability to the aks-preview CLI extension. […]

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Distributing Bicep Modules with Token-Based Access Using ACR

Pixel Robots. — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:00:51 +0000

Reading Time: 6 minutesBicep 0.45.6 added ociEnabled, an experimental feature that routes module pulls through ORAS using Docker-style credentials instead of the Azure SDK. I have been waiting for something like this for a long time. If you work at an MSP or build shared platform tooling, you will know why. You have […]

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