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Planned maintenance and auto-upgrade for AKS

  • June 15, 2021
  • 5 min read
Cloud and Virtualization Architect. Florent is specializing in public, hybrid, and private cloud technologies. He is a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management and an MCSE in Private Cloud.
Cloud and Virtualization Architect. Florent is specializing in public, hybrid, and private cloud technologies. He is a Microsoft MVP in Cloud and Datacenter Management and an MCSE in Private Cloud.

Planned Maintenance

Microsoft is innovating and release this time a new feature, planned maintenance. The full documentation is here:

Use Planned Maintenance for your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster (preview) – Azure Kubernetes Service | Microsoft Docs

What it will do? It will give a window for upgrade or maintenance of AKS clusters. To enable this, for example at 14h CET every Monday, use the following command:

Upgrade or maintenance of AKS clusters

The following command will show you all maintenance window, for a specific cluster:

All maintenance window, for a specific cluster

Auto-Upgrade

A new nice feature is the auto upgrade of AKS clusters. Of course, you should be careful with this feature, because of breaking changes between AKS version, for major version. The full documentation is available here:

Upgrade an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster – Azure Kubernetes Service | Microsoft Docs

We have 5 options for the auto-upgrade:

  • none: auto-upgrade is disabled, by default
  • patch: upgrade to the more recent minor version, after the second point (1.18.22)
  • stable: upgrade to the more recent major version, after the first point (1.19.11)
  • rapid:
  • node-image:Before starting, we will check if updates are available.

Check if updates

Here, I’m in version 1.18.19. I see that I can do upgrade to version 1.19.9 or 11. Let’s start by activating the feature. The first thing is to activate the feature:

Activate the feature

To check the status of the registration, use this command:

Check the status of the registration

Check the status of the registration

When the status is Registered, you need to register the provider again:

Now, we will set the auto update to the stable channel:

Because I set a planned maintenance window in the previous chapter, the upgrade will be done at this time. After the time, if you check available version, you will see you current version (it has been updated) and next updates, that will be done during the next maintenance window, next Monday:

Output table

Register the provider again

It is a very nice feature, but be careful about the channel that you will use and breaking changes that can break your deployment scripts.

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Dmytro Malynka
Dmytro Malynka StarWind Virtual SAN Product Manager
We’ve got you covered! StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is specifically designed to provide highly-available shared storage for Hyper-V, vSphere, and KVM clusters. With StarWind VSAN, simplicity is key: utilize the local disks of your hypervisor hosts and create shared HA storage for your VMs. Interested in learning more? Book a short StarWind VSAN demo now and see it in action!