Upgrading AKS in Mission Critical Environments

Learn about different approaches of upgrading AKS in production for minimal risk of failures.

AKS is a managed Kubernetes service running in Azure. It is managed in the sense that Microsoft offers a serverless Kubernetes making you responsible for only your workload and not for the system”-pods”. However, as Kubernetes comes frequently with new versions which sometimes can introduce breaking changes for your workload, you must trigger these AKS upgrades by yourself, so you are always in control. The challenge then is to be fully in control. As we are all humans and tend to make mistakes, you must choose the right AKS upgrade strategy that will prevent your workload from being inaccessible due possible upgrade failures.

In this session, you will first hear about upgrade failures that happened in real production environments. We will then introduce you to 3 basic upgrade strategies for AKS before you learn how they can fit into different architectures. As every architecture has its own challenges, you will learn about each of them in detail, so you can at the end decide for yourself what architecture fits your organization best.

Finally, we will introduce you to a new Azure service called Container Apps and discuss how it eventually may solve all or some of the challenges of safe AKS upgrades.

Speakers:
Sven Malvik - Head of Cloud Platform at Vipps; Azure MVP
Andreas Dreyer Hysing - Senior Cloud Engineer at Vipps