AKS Prepared Image Specification: pre-baked node images for faster scale-out
Anyone who has run large GPU or AI workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service knows the pain: a scale-out event fires, a new node joins the pool, and then it sits there for minutes pulling container images and running initialization tasks before it can accept a single pod. When your model image is 20 GB and […]
Azure Red Hat OpenShift moves the control plane out of your subscription
Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) is now available with hosted control planes in public preview. Red Hat announced the change on September 15, and it restructures where the most expensive and least visible part of your cluster actually runs: instead of three control plane virtual machines sitting in your Azure subscription, the control plane runs […]
Defender for Cloud brings serverless container posture to Azure Container Apps
Microsoft has made Azure Container Apps environments available in Defender for Cloud’s Serverless Containers Posture experience, now generally available. Security teams can pull their Container Apps estate into posture management from a single workflow instead of treating each serverless platform separately. The capability also covers Azure Container Instances and Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate. The […]
AKS Artifact Streaming Reaches General Availability
Pulling images is the slow part nobody budgets for If you have ever watched a scale-out event on AKS with one eye on the pod list, you know the pattern: the scheduler places pods in seconds, then everything sits in ContainerCreating while each node drags a multi-gigabyte image out of Azure Container Registry. Your autoscaler […]
eBPF Host Routing Hits General Availability in Advanced Container Networking Services for AKS
Running high throughput or low latency distributed systems on Kubernetes often hits an unexpected bottleneck inside the Linux kernel network stack. Microsoft has officially announced the general availability of eBPF Host Routing within Advanced Container Networking Services (ACNS) for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This release fundamentally transforms how network packets move between pods and nodes […]
Prepared Image Specification on AKS tackles the cold-start node problem
What is Prepared Image Specification? If you run AI training jobs, GPU inference, or large Windows workloads on AKS, you have probably noticed the startup lag. A new node joins the cluster, and then it spends minutes pulling container images before it can actually run anything. For autoscaling events, those minutes add up. Azure’s Prepared […]