Azure

If you've worked with Kubernetes for a while you should have seen that version lifecycle that Kubernetes has is pretty aggressive. Kubernetes is being actively developed which means that new releases come out pretty frequently - and all of us who are using Kubernetes, be it a managed or a self-hosted distribution, must adapt and adjust. If not, we may risk running our workloads on unsupported version of Kubernetes with lacking security and functionality fixes. In addition, when the time comes to upgrade there's a big risk that the change gap will be too large from the Kubernetes version you're running and the one you want to upgrade to - this normally ends up in a complicated and unstable upgrade process which I wouldn't recommend to anyone, especially in a production environment…😑 ...

In some cases you may have an Microsoft Entra ID tenant that doesn’t have an active subscription connected to it but you would nevertheless want to log in to it from a command line for instance, with Azure CLI. You may want to perform actions like creating a Microsoft Entra ID Application for example. In this case you need to be cautious about the login command you’re running so that you don’t waste a lot of time on debugging an error you could have avoided in the first place (like someone did 😁)! ...

In this blog post I would like to talk about Accelerated Networking, how it can improve internal communication inside an AKS cluster and how you can enable that for Linux and Windows AKS nodes. But first, let's get the basics straight. What is Accelerated Networking and why use it in AKS? Accelerated Networking (AN) is something that has been around in Azure for a few years now - I think I have read about it for the first time around 2018. Until recently this functionality has been mainly mentioned in terms of classic Azure VMs or Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS). It's not that long ago that the possibility for Accelerated Networking got introduced in Azure Kubernetes Service though, especially if we're talking about Windows nodes. When I tested this back in February 2022, support for AN in Windows nodes in AKS was still in private preview but fortunately, a few months later this has been included as part of standard AKS offering. Now, when you create an AKS cluster or a new node pool, be it Linux or Windows, Accelerated Networking will be enabled automatically for you. And this is a reason for celebration, my friend - you'll understand why when I show you the numbers!😼 ...

Welcome to Part 2 of blog post series on Continuous Delivery to Azure Kubernetes Service with Azure DevOps Environments! In Part 1 we looked into what Azure DevOps Environments are, what benefits they provide and how I would recommend to create ADO environments and resources based on my own experience. If you haven't read Part 1, you can check it out here: Continuous Delivery to AKS With Azure DevOps Environments - Part 1. ...

It’s time for a new edition of Kris’s Quick cup of Kubernetes where I’m utilizing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for demo purposes!😺 In second edition of this tech tip series I would like to share a few tips related to CronJobs, Rolling Updates and AKS add-ons that can make your life easier when working with Kubernetes and specifically Azure Kubernetes Service. #1 - Run CronJob instantly Sometimes you may need to run a CronJob (scheduled Job) instantly, for example, when you’re debugging some execution errors. So, can you do that instantly or do you need to wait for the next time slot that the CronJob is scheduled for to execute? Well, you can pretty easily create a regular Job based on CronJob definition and in that way trigger it instantly - here’s how you can do that with kubectl: ...