AKS on bare metal now runs on Ubuntu hosts
Microsoft has expanded AKS on bare metal to support Ubuntu as a host operating system, and the new option is in public preview now. The original preview paired the service with Azure Linux 3.0 running on validated Azure Local small form factor hardware, which was a sensible but narrow starting point. If your racks were […]
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 […]
Ubuntu 26.04 Comes to AKS in Public Preview: Inside the Ubuntu2604 OS SKU
Azure Kubernetes Service added public preview support for Ubuntu 26.04 on September 30, 2026, through a new versioned OS SKU called Ubuntu2604. The SKU is built on Ubuntu Minimal rather than the standard Ubuntu Server image, which changes what lands on your nodes before a single container starts. Anyone who manages Ubuntu node pools should […]
Confidential VMs for Azure Linux reach GA in AKS
Microsoft has taken Confidential VMs for Azure Linux to general availability in Azure Kubernetes Service. Teams running sensitive container workloads can now build AKS node pools on hardware-encrypted VMs, and the announcement stresses the part that matters most: no application code changes are required. What a confidential VM actually gives you A confidential virtual machine […]
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 […]
Azure says goodbye to OS Guard: what AKS operators should do before December 10
The short version Microsoft will retire Azure Linux with OS Guard on Azure Kubernetes Service on December 10, 2026. On that date you will not be able to create new OS Guard node pools, and existing ones stop receiving support. The stated replacement is Azure Container Linux, which went generally available on AKS starting with […]
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 […]
AKS control plane metrics now generally available with Managed Prometheus
Azure has made control plane metrics collection for AKS generally available, and it runs on Azure Monitor Managed Service for Prometheus. Until now, getting visibility into the managed Kubernetes control plane meant either accepting whatever Azure surfaced in its own dashboards or standing up your own Prometheus and scraping whatever you could reach. This closes […]
AKS Application Routing with Gateway API hits GA, simplifies Kubernetes traffic management
What is Application Routing with Gateway API? Azure Kubernetes Service now supports the Kubernetes Gateway API natively for ingress traffic management, and it’s generally available. This isn’t just another ingress controller option. The Gateway API is a different approach to routing altogether, and the AKS implementation comes with Azure DNS and Key Vault TLS integration […]