Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) December update

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) recently made the following notable updates:

Adoption of Moby as container runtime

To deliver more frequent upstream patches and improvements to the container runtime, AKS has adopted Moby, the open-source project that Docker is based on. With the exception of GPU-based VMs, all new AKS nodes are now provisioned with Moby as the container runtime, including new nodes in existing clusters added via the scale or upgrade commands.

As the upstream Moby project does not currently publish versioned releases, you’ll see a Microsoft-defined version (currently 3.0.1) for the container runtime when Moby is present. Microsoft will periodically validate and build new versions of Moby and make them available in AKS.

Reduction in cluster-provisioning time

AKS has deployed a series of improvements that have led to significant reductions in cluster provisioning times. Average creation times are now between five and six minutes in all regions. Additional improvements are planned to further reduce this time.

Fix for Stream Watcher error

The fix for the problem described in this GitHub issue has been rolled out to all regions. All new clusters will get the fix. Existing clusters require a scale or upgrade operation to pick it up.

Fix for kube-dns lookup issue

The Linux kernel that contains the fix for the problem described in this GitHub issue has been integrated to the base OS image for AKS and is now available in all regions. New nodes will automatically get the new image.