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 Read more
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 Read more
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 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