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

Hello everyone,

The July update of AKS on Azure Stack HCI and Windows Server is now available! This month we're excited to share scale-up load balancer support so your load balancer for higher availability.

As always, you can try AKS on Azure Stack HCI or Windows Server any time by registering here. If you do not have the hardware handy to evaluate AKS on physical hardware you can use an Azure VM:  https://aka.ms/aks-hci-evalonazure.

Here are some of the changes you'll see in this update:

Horizontal autoscaling and manual vertical scaling are now supported in production (GA)

In April, we released a preview of horizontal autoscaling and vertical manual scaling.  Since then, we've been able to add more validation and bug fixes, so they are being promoted from preview to generally available and supported in production.

Multiple load balancers for high availability

July release supports multiple load balancer instances per cluster.  With multiple load balancer instances, if one fails, another instance will take over.  This makes the Kubernetes API server highly available and ensures that external traffic can always reach the services running inside the cluster.

Scale up your load balancer in HAProxy configuration.

Security and reliability improvements

We have two main OSS component updates this month -

1. KubeVIP has been updated from 0.3.4 to 0.4.4
   KubeVIP is used as the load balancer component for all control plane API servers in target clusters and the management cluster. Moving from 0.3.4 to 0.4.4 introduces not only a series of bugfixes and CVE related changes, it also moves us on to the latest supported minor release. 0.4.x contains several new features like automatic IPVS load-balances for control-planes, automatic detection of the interface for the VIP, and several more functional improvements which increase the stability of the platform.
2. Mariner has been updated to Mariner release 1.0.20220709

Bug fixes:

• Added a fix so that resources are automatically cleaned up in the instance of object creation failure

Documentation updates

We have new docs this month on using multiple load balancers for high availability.

Updates

• Use the autoscaler profile to configure cluster autoscaling (now GA)
• Vertical node scaling in Azure Kubernetes Services (now GA)

Once you have downloaded and installed the AKS on Azure Stack HCI April 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