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Hi All,


 


I am excited to let you know that the first update for AKS on Azure Stack HCI of 2021 is now available.  You can evaluate the AKS on Azure Stack HCI February Update by registering for the Public Preview here: https://aka.ms/AKS-HCI-Evaluate (If you have already downloaded AKS on Azure Stack HCI – this evaluation link has now been updated with the February Update).


 


Some of the new changes in the AKS on Azure Stack HCI February Update include:


 


Support for completely Static IP environments


With this update we no longer require a DHCP server for any part of the AKS-HCI infrastructure.  When you deploy AKS-HCI you can now specify if you want to use DHCP or Static IP addresses.  If you choose to use Static IP addresses – we will ask you to provide two IP address ranges.  The first range will be used for any Kubernetes control plane and worker node virtual machines that we create, while the second range will be used for any containerized applications that you deploy on top of AKS-HCI.


 


Integration with Active Directory


When we first launched the public preview of AKS-HCI, we talked about all the security work we had in the pipeline (in this blog post: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-stack-blog/security-capabilities-in-azure-kubernetes-service-on-azure-stack/ba-p/1705759).  With the February Update for AKS-HCI we are now introducing integration with Active Directory.  This means that when you create a new Kubernetes cluster you can now enable Active Directory integration.  The effect of this is:



  • Your kubeconfig file will no longer contain a secret hash

  • You can specify users or user groups in your Active Directory environment who have access to the Kubernetes cluster

  • You can even use Active Directory and Kubernetes RBAC to give users in your environment limited access to only a subset of deployments in your Kubernetes cluster


 


Evaluation in Azure


Finally – many of you let us know that while you were interested in learning more about AKS-HCI – it was hard to get the hardware necessary for a full AKS-HCI deployment.  In response to this we have created a guide for evaluating AKS-HCI inside an Azure VM: https://aka.ms/aks-hci-evalonazure


 


Obviously, this is not meant for production environments.  And if you want to run containers on Azure you should just be using AKS!  But this provides an easy way to get up and running with AKS-HCI with zero hardware – so you can figure out how it could work for you.


 


There have been several other changes and fixes that you can read about in the February Update release notes (https://github.com/Azure/aks-hci/releases/tag/AKS-HCI-2102)


 


Once you have downloaded and installed the AKS on Azure Stack HCI February Update – you can report any issues you encounter, and track future feature work on our GitHub Project at https://github.com/Azure/aks-hci


 


I look forward to hearing from you all!


 


Cheers,


Ben

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