Reading Time: 3 minutes For as long as I remember AKS has only officially supported two CNI’s, Kubenet and Azure CNI. That is until 2nd April 2022 when they announced the ability to create an AKS cluster with no CNI. This means you can deploy any CNI you would like. In this blog post […] The post Bring your own Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) (PREVIEW) appeared first on Pixel Robots ..read more

Reading Time: 2 minutes As we know hybrid cloud adoption varies across the industry. And whether or not you’re planning to go hybrid or fully to the cloud, Microsoft is slowly nudging sysadmins there with changes in its tech solutions and licensing models anyhow. Some of these being the developments in Microsoft’s core hybrid […] The post Sponsored: How Azure Stack HCI is forcing changes in your datacenter – free webinar appeared first on Pixel Robots ..read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes If, like me, you’ve been using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for a while, you have probably heard of AKS addons. You may have even installed some. But do you actually know how they get updated and whose responsibility it is to do the updates. In this article I’m going to explain just that. I’m also going to explain what AKS cluster extensions are. These are relatively new and something I think we will be seeing more of in the future. Anyway, let’s get to it. AKS addons So, let’s have a little recap on what AKS addons are. AKS addons are a way for you, the operator of ..read more

Reading Time: < 1 minute The previously published SysAdmin Horror Stories Vol.1 and Vol.2 highlighted some of SysAdmins’ funniest and most horrifying stories. They proved so successful, that Altaro decided to produce a third and final edition: they’ve gathered some more real-life stories to share with you, that are both funny and horrific! We all know that a SysAdmin’s job is no easy task, and apart from constantly having systems to update, bugs to fix and users to please, SysAdmins encounter all sorts of situations throughout their careers. From tech situations to funny anecdotes, terribl ..read more

Reading Time: 4 minutes The other day someone reached out to me via LinkedIn and asked is it possible to have a Kubernetes deployment deploy on to an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) node pool first and when the node pool is full burst to Azure Container Instances (ACI), or virtual nodes in AKS. Looking at the Microsoft docs regarding bursting to ACI, all of the examples tell you how to specify the Kubernetes deployment must use the virtual node, but not how to only use it when there is no space left in the node pool. So, I decided to have a little play with node affinity. (https://kubernetes.io ..read more

Reading Time: 5 minutes Recently I have been going through the AKS-Preview az cli extension and found reference to a GitOps AKS addon. I have been waiting for something like this to come to AKS for a long time. In fact, it is already available for ARC enabled Kubernetes clusters. Below I will go through how to set it up in your AKS cluster. Warning This is still in preview, uses flux v1 and should not be used for production clusters. You can currently only run this in eastus2euap, eastus, westeurope regions. So, for this you will need the AKS-Preview extension and k8s-configuration of AZ CL ..read more

Reading Time: 4 minutes If like me, you have been working with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or any Kubernetes cluster and want to assign a DNS record to an ingress resource you must manually do it or script something using Azure CLI. Yes, I have done this, and it sort of works. But now you don’t must do it manually or use a script. You can use an awesome tool called ExternalDNS (https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/external-dns) ExternalDNS runs on your AKS cluster and when you deploy an Ingress object it will update your DNS zone with the correct record. One good thing with this tool is you ..read more

Reading Time: 3 minutes If you have been following along with my blog, you may have come across some previous posts about updating Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).  One (https://pixelrobots.co.uk/2019/05/apply-os-updates-to-aks-nodes-without-an-upgrade/) talked about kured (KUbernetes REboot Daemon) by weaveworks  https://github.com/weaveworks/kured. The issue with this method is it only supported Linux Kubernetes nodes. So, your windows Kubernetes nodes were left unpatched till a full cluster version upgrade. Not good. Recently Microsoft implemented a way to manually update the Kube ..read more

Reading Time: 4 minutes Did you know that even when you have enabled Azure AD integration with your AKS cluster, a subscription Owner and Contributor can still access you AKS cluster with the -admin switch? In fact, anyone who is a member of the Azure Kubernetes Service Cluster Admin Role (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/role-based-access-control/built-in-roles#azure-kubernetes-service-cluster-admin-role) can. You were able to use Kubernetes RBAC (Role Based Access Control) to limit this before, but I have not seen many people do this, or even aware you could. (https://pixelrobots.co.u ..read more

Reading Time: < 1 minute Over the last few months or so I have had the pleasure of tech reviewing the “Hands-on Kubernetes on Azure” third edition book by Packt Publishing. This edition has so much more than the previous books. In fact, it has gone from just over 300 pages to over 500! What’s even better is Microsoft are giving away the eBook version for Free! So, what are you waiting for, go to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/get-started-with-kubernetes-on-azure/ and download your copy now! If you have any feedback, please let me know. The post The hands-on Kubernetes on Azur ..read more