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. Read more
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 Read more
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 Read more
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 Read more
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. Read more
Reading Time: 4 minutesMicrosoft has just shipped the Inspektor Gadget cluster extension for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and it is worth a look if you have ever been stuck trying to figure out why a pod is making strange DNS calls, why a process is misbehaving, or where that mysterious TCP connection is Read more
Reading Time: 5 minutesI have been chipping away at extending KubeBuddy beyond the CLI for a while. This week I shipped two things that are genuinely useful if you run Headlamp as your Kubernetes dashboard, which you should. The first is the KubeBuddy Headlamp plugin, which brings the full KubeBuddy check catalog (excluding Read more
Reading Time: 5 minutesBack in November I wrote about Flatcar Container Linux landing on AKS in preview. The short version was that it was a promising immutable OS worth testing for cloud-native workloads, but rough around the edges as a preview. Well, Microsoft has now taken that foundation and turned it into something Read more
Reading Time: 4 minutesEvery so often, Microsoft quietly updates an existing docs page and sneaks in a feature that solves a problem you didn’t even realise was fixable. The MaxUnavailable fallback is one of those. I picked it up through the AKS Docs Tracker I run here on pixelrobots.co.uk, which flagged a change Read more
Reading Time: 8 minutesMicrosoft recently released a public preview of cert-manager as an Azure Arc Kubernetes extension. The docs focus entirely on Arc-enabled clusters, which makes sense given it shipped under the Arc umbrella. But I wanted to know whether it would work on a regular AKS cluster, and the short answer is Read more