General Availability: Azure CNI Overlay
Published date: April 17, 2023
Azure CNI overlay in now generally available. Azure CNI overlay addresses performance, scalability and IP exhaustion challenges while using traditional Azure Container Networking Interface (CNI). With Azure CNI overlay AKS clusters can be scaled to very large sizes by assigning pod IP addresses from user defined overlay address space which are logically different from VNet IP address space hosting the cluster nodes. Additionally, user defined private CIDR can be reused in different AKS clusters, truly extending the IP space available for containerized applications in AKS. Pod and node traffic within the cluster use an overlay network via Azure Software Defined Network (SDN) without any additional encapsulation. Network Address Translation (using the node's IP address) is used to reach resources outside the cluster. Azure CNI Overlay is currently only GA for Linux but will be fully supporting Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2022 in the near future. To learn more, visit: Configure Azure CNI Overlay networking in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) - Azure Kubernetes Service | Microsoft Learn