Hi All,
Yes, I know that it is actually August and I am announcing the AKS on Azure Stack HCI July update. But some times things take a little bit longer to get them just right. With that acknowledged - I am happy to announce that the AKS on Azure Stack HCI July update is now available! You can evaluate AKS-HCI by registering here: https://aka.ms/AKS-HCI-Evaluate.
With this update - we are bringing in the following changes:
Updated Kubernetes versions
With this update we are bring in support for Kubernetes 1.21. Which in turn means that we are phasing out support for Kubernetes 1.18. We will be supporting Kubernetes 1.21, 1.20 & 1.19. But do not worry - if you have deployed a Kubernetes 1.18 cluster it is easy to update your Kubernetes version while you are updating AKS. You can read all about how to do that here.
Calico as the default CNI for new Kubernetes clusters
AKS on Azure Stack HCI supports both Flannel and Calico as container networking interfaces (CNI). With the July update - if you create a new Kubernetes cluster and do not specify which CNI you want to use, we will use Calico. In previous releases we have defaulted to using flannel.
Security Hardening
Along with the usual inclusion of updates and security patches that are included in every update of AKS on Azure Stack HCI, the July update has a number of targeted security hardening improvements. One example is that with the July update we are now enabling secure boot on all of the worker node and control plane virtual machines that are created when you deploy a Kubernetes cluster.
Accessibility improvements for Windows Admin Center
We have also conducted full accessibility review of the AKS Windows Admin Center extension, and have made many changes to the product as a result.
Once you have downloaded and installed the AKS on Azure Stack HCI July 2021 Update – you can report any issues you encounter, and track future feature work on our GitHub Project at https://github.com/Azure/aks-hci. And, if you do not have the hardware handy to evaluate AKS on Azure Stack HCI you can follow our guide for evaluating AKS-HCI inside an Azure VM: https://aka.ms/aks-hci-evalonazure.
I look forward to hearing from you all!
Cheers,
Ben
Microsoft