AKS on Azure Stack HCI and Windows Server - August 2022 update

Hello everyone,

The August update of AKS on Azure Stack HCI and Windows Server is now available!  This release has a number of important updates in our underlying Kubernetes infrastructure including Kubernetes 1.23.* support.  We also moved the Windows container runtime to containerd.

As always, you can try AKS on Azure Stack HCI or Windows Server any time using our get-started guide.  If you do not have the hardware handy to evaluate AKS on physical hardware you can use our eval guide to set up AKS on a Windows Server Azure VM.

Here are more details about the changes you'll see in this update:

Support for Kubernetes 1.23.3 and 1.23.5

I'm happy to announce that the AKS on Azure Stack HCI and Windows Server August release lets you create or update to use Kubernetes 1.23.* for your target clusters. 

Kubernetes 1.23.* brings in a number of quality and stability updates including tools to observe and manage individual pods within clusters using a set of temporary containers. Kubernetes 1.23.* also promoted horizontal pod autoscaling (HPA) and dual stack IPv4/IPv6 networking to be generally available.  While AKS on HCI and Windows Server doesn't support IPV6 at this point, having the underlying infrastructure available is an important development which presents new opportunity.

Updated from CAPI alpha to CAPI beta

Kubernetes uses CAPI (Cloud API) under the hood to automate different lifecycle management operations on different physical infrastructure.  In August we have moved from CAPI v1alpha4 to CAPI v1beta1. (read more)

Windows containers are moving to containerd as their container runtime + Docker support deprecation

The Kubernetes community has been migrating away from dockershim and to containerd to support richer around pod/placement aware container management and to standardize on one runtime (read more).  We’re happy to share that Windows containers are joining Linux containers on containerd starting in August.

In alignment with the Kubernetes community, Docker will no longer be supported as a container runtime for Windows containers after September 1st, 2022. Please upgrade to K8s v1.22.11, 1.23.3 or 1.23.5 which use containerd as the container runtime (the Aug release). 

Software Defined Networking (SDN) integration is available in preview

SDN is now part of AKS on Azure Stack HCI!  You may have seen the SDN preview in May (read more) to let you try SDN in a separate preview image; now SDN is part of the GA image rather than a preview ring release while we finish validation.

As a reminder, SDN provides Azure-equivalent networking services such as Load Balancers, Network Security Groups (NSGs), and User Defined Routes (UDR) with SDN.

Options to configure # of concurrent downloads

Now you can use the -concurrentDownloads parameter with Set-AksHciConfig to configure the number of concurrent downloads used to download large files for installs and upgrades.  We have seen that reducing the number of concurrent downloads from the default 10 to fewer concurrent connections (2 or so) can resolve issues with partial downloads. 

Full AKS support for single node AzureStack HCI

We have done enough testing to say AKS on single node Azure Stack HCI is fully stable and supported.  This is a great option for those of you with limited hardware.

Bug fixes:

• More stable vhd sync experience.
• Improved state management
• Fixing issue where there are duplicate instances of the cloud agent service running in a cluster

Once you have downloaded and installed the AKS on Azure Stack HCI or Windows Server Update – you can report any issues you encounter and track future feature work on our GitHub Project at  https://github.com/Azure/aks-hci.

We look forward to hearing from you all!

Cheers,

Sarah