Microsoft Azure Updates: CNI Overlay; Isovalent; AKS

In a slate of recent announcements, Microsoft expanded capabilities around Azure Kubernetes Service.

CVP Deepak Bansal shared the general availability of CNI Overlay in AKS. The initiative is intended to support network performance and scalability. Traditionally, customers needed to plan IP addresses in advance with Azure Container Networking Instance, risking IP address exhaustion. AKS customers have access to multiple network plugin options when creating a cluster. The “kubenet” plugin is built on Azure route tables and a bridge plugin. The CNI Overlay assigns IP addresses based on user-defined overlay address spaces rather than VNET IP addresses. With the new offering, when a node joins an AKS cluster it is assigned a /24 IP address block from Pod CIDR. Bansal offered data comparing CNI Overlay with VXLAN-based Overlay, Host Network, and Cilium eBPF dataplane.