Azure Kubernetes Service Now Supports Windows Server 2022 -- Redmondmag.com

Azure Kubernetes Service Now Supports Windows Server 2022

By Kurt Mackie
10/10/2022

Microsoft on Monday announced the "general availability" commercial release of Windows Server 2022 on the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Windows Server 2022 was announced as a separate, commercially available product last month. Now it's available as an option for the AKS service, either as a host or a virtual machine image. Previously, AKS subscribers were able to use Windows Server 2019 or Ubuntu Linux.

"In AKS, the VM image for your cluster's nodes is based on Ubuntu Linux or Windows Server 2019," Microsoft's AKS "concepts" article, dated Sept. 14, had explained.

Organizations get some image-size benefits from using Windows Server 2022 with AKS in comparison with Windows Server 2019. The container base image size is "up to 30%" smaller with Windows Server 2022. Microsoft also claimed that the Nano Server and Sever Core images of Windows Server 2022 are smaller by "up to 10% and 14% respectively" compared with those images available with Windows Server 2019.

Users of Windows Server 2022 on AKS also are getting networking benefits that "have not been backported to Windows Server 2019." Those benefits include:

Faster synchronization of proxy rules for large clusters
Session affinity support where "connections from a particular client are passed to the same pod each time"
More reliable core container operations, particularly with regard to "setup and teardown," and
Packet-forwarding performance improvement in the Hyper-V virtual switch.

Organizations wanting to upgrade from Windows Server 2019 to Windows Server 2022 have to create a "separate node pool for Windows Server 2022," as the two operating systems "cannot co-exist on the same node pool on AKS," Microsoft explained in this August announcement.

Organizations will need Kubernetes 1.23 to use Windows Server 2022 on AKS.

"Windows Server 2022 is supported on node pools running Kubernetes 1.23 and above, with containerd as the container runtime," Microsoft's Monday announcement indicated.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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