Generally Available: Azure CNI Node Subnet + Cilium Support

Generally Available: Azure CNI Node Subnet + Cilium Support
To improve compatibility and flexibility for customers transitioning to ePBF-based networking, AKS now supports the Cilium dataplane with Azure CNI Node Subnet. This enhancement allows you to leverage Cilium’s advanced networking capabilities while using Node Subnet IP allocation, maintaining your existing IP allocation strategies.

Generally Available: Cilium Endpoint Slices in AKS
AKS now supports Cilium endpoint slices, improving scalability and efficiency of network endpoint management. By reducing API server load and optimizing service discovery, endpoint slices enhance networking performance for AKS clusters using the Cilium dataplane.

Generally Available: Network isolated cluster in AKS
Today, you can control an AKS cluster's egress traffic using Azure Firewall. While this configuration is intended to isolate the cluster to protect sensitive business or customer data, it adds an additional layer of management complexity and cost.
AKS now provides the option to use network isolated clusters to simplify the process of restricting network access and reduce the risk of unintentional exposure of the cluster's public endpoints to prevent security breaches.

Generally Available: AKS Cost Recommendations in Azure Advisor
To help you optimize your AKS clusters, Azure Advisor now offers AKS cost recommendations. These advisors are designed to identify cost savings opportunities and provide actionable insights to enforce AKS cost best practices. The recommendations are tailored to your cluster configuration and target rightsizing, autoscaling, visibility, and SKU selection scenarios.

Generally Available: Skip Automatic GPU Driver Installation
By default, AKS installs NVIDIA GPU drivers when a node pool is created using a VM size that supports NVIDIA GPUs. The ability to skip automatic driver installation on your GPU-enabled node pools is now generally available. This option allows you to self-install custom GPU drivers or use the GPU Operator on Linux and Windows node pools.

Generally Available: Multi-cluster Auto-upgrade in Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager
Platform administrators managing large number of Kubernetes clusters face the challenge of updating Kubernetes or node images in a way that is safe and predictable. To address this challenge, Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager (Fleet Manager) provides update runs which are used to deploy updates across multiple Kubernetes clusters using safe deployment practices.

Fleet Manager is announcing the general availability of Auto-upgrade support, which provides an automated trigger for update runs based on new Kubernetes or node image versions being published to Azure. Admins can create multiple auto-upgrade profiles for their fleet to capture combinations of Kubernetes and node image version updates. Additionally, existing update run strategies can be used to determine the order in which clusters are updated, while guaranteeing cluster upgrades occur within the maintenance windows configured at each cluster.

Generally Available: Azure Linux 3.0 Support in AKS
Azure Linux 3.0, the next major version release of the Azure Linux container host for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), is now generally available and defaults on Kubernetes version 1.32. Azure Linux 3.0 offers increased package availability and versions, an updated kernel, and improvements to performance, security, and tooling and developer experience.

Generally Available: AKS Communication Manager
The AKS communication manager streamlines notifications for all your AKS maintenance tasks by using Azure Resource Notification and Azure Resource Graph frameworks. This tool enables you to monitor your upgrades closely by providing timely alerts on event triggers and outcomes. If maintenance fails, it notifies you with the reasons for the failure, reducing operational hassles related to observability and follow-ups. You can set up notifications for all types of auto upgrades that utilize maintenance windows.

Generally Available: Azure CNI Overlay Dual-stack with Cilium Dataplane Support
Azure CNI overlay now supports dual-stack networking with Azure CNI powered by Cilium, enabling customers to enforce IPv6 network policies and leverage Advanced Container Networking Services (ACNS) in dual-stack environments. This update allows customers using Cilium with overlay mode to fully utilize IPv4 and IPv6 together, enhancing security, scalability, and networking capabilities in AKS.

​​**Generally Available: New Microsoft Dev Box Regional Availability​
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Microsoft Dev Box is now available in Spain Central. For more information on Dev Box regional availability, see here.