Reading Time: 8 minutesI have been waiting for something like this for a while. If you run AKS at any meaningful scale, one of the hardest problems you eventually hit is the multi-cluster networking story. How do services across clusters discover each other? How do you enforce mTLS across cluster boundaries? How do Read more
Reading Time: 5 minutesI spotted something land in the Azure CLI extensions repo this week. PR #9669 adds CLI support for App Routing Istio, including new –enable-app-routing-istio flags on az aks create and az aks update, plus dedicated az aks approuting gateway istio enable and disable subcommands in the aks-preview extension. The PR Read more
Reading Time: 5 minutesI’ve been running AKS clusters in production for a long time. I’ve seen the same patterns play out over and over, someone stands up a cluster, it works great in dev, and then six months later they’re rebuilding the whole thing because a networking decision made on day one turned Read more
Reading Time: 8 minutesAfter writing about Ingress NGINX retiring in March 2026, I recommended a two-phase migration approach. Start with Application Routing add-on for quick stability, then migrate to Envoy Gateway as the long-term strategic choice. Several readers asked for more detail on the Envoy Gateway piece, specifically around installation and the different configuration Read more
Reading Time: 4 minutesWe’ve all been there. You upgrade a node pool, something breaks in production, and you’re left deciding whether to push forward with a fix or try to undo what you just did. Until recently, “undoing” a Kubernetes version upgrade in AKS wasn’t a first-class operation. You’d be looking at manual Read more
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