Pixel Robots. ☁️☸️ (Richard Hooper)

Exciting news! My co-author @whaakman and I just released our new book "Azure Containers Explained" published by @PacktPublishing! Learn when to use what container technology on Azure. Get your copy now: a.co/d/gvyABCA #Azure #Containers #CloudComputing

Missing out on KubeCon Amsterdam this year due to some unexpected health news. I'm gutted to be missing it, but I’ve spent the last few days undergoing and recovering from emergency spine surgery. Everything went well, and I’m on the mend now. 🥂 See you all at the next one! Hopefully someone will pick up my live tweeting of the AKS pre day!

You heard it here first… Istio Gateway is now in preview on the Application Routing add-on for AKS 👀 This is a really interesting step forward for Gateway API on AKS, and I’ve put together a blog post with more detail on what it is and how to get started. Find out more here: pixelrobots.co.uk/2026/03/aks-ap… #AKS #Azure #Kubernetes #Istio #GatewayAPI #CloudNative

@unixterminal Oh man. Now that's a good use of AI. I wonder if we'll see this become mainstream going forward. Hope it goes well. Good luck and a speedy recovery!

My surgery is set for May 1. Two years of worsening stress, sleep issues, and endocrine chaos. Downloading my labs and Garmin data, AI immediately detected what 7 doctors missed: A golf ball-sized mass had been growing on my thyroid.

🚨 Kubernetes v1.36 is officially dropping on April 22, 2026. Here are the 6 major updates you need to prepare your clusters for: 👇 1⃣ HPA Scale-to-Zero (Enabled by Default): → HPAScaleToZero graduates after sitting in alpha since v1.16. → You can now reliably set minReplicas: 0. → Massive cost-saver for idle staging environments and batch processing pipelines. 2⃣ Ephemeral SA Tokens for Image Pulls: → Replaces long-lived static secrets for private registry authentication. → Uses short-lived, auto-rotating Service Account tokens instead. → Credentials are now scoped directly to the pod's identity, vastly reducing leak risks. 3⃣ Smarter HPA Pod Selection: → Fixes the issue where HPA calculates metrics from orphaned or stale pods. → New logic ensures HPA only reads metrics from pods explicitly managed by the target workload. → Autoscaling behavior becomes significantly more predictable and reliable. 4⃣ kube-proxy IPVS Mode Removal: → IPVS mode was deprecated in v1.35 and is slated for complete removal. → Time to migrate your clusters to iptables (nftables backend) or eBPF-based proxying (like Cilium). → Plan your migration now before a patch upgrade breaks your networking stack. 5⃣ Ingress NGINX Retirement & Gateway API: → The upstream community is actively shifting away from Ingress NGINX. → Gateway API is establishing itself as the new standard for traffic management. → Brings native cross-namespace routing without relying on a patchwork of custom annotations. 6⃣ Containerd 2.x Alignment: → v1.36 will likely be the final release to support older versions of containerd (like 1.6.x). → The Kubernetes project is fully aligning its ecosystem with containerd 2.x. → Upgrade your container runtimes now to avoid breaking changes in the next cycle.

CVE-2026-3864: CSI Driver for NFS path traversal via subDir may delete unintended directories on the NFS server - github.com/kubernetes/kub…

The Invisible Rewrite: Modernizing the Kubernetes Image Promoter - kubernetes.io/blog/2026/03/1… #Kubernetes

Microsoft announces Copilot leadership updates. msft.it/6010Qojbo

After years of running AKS in production (and learning the hard way), I wrote a book about the decisions that really matter. 📘 The AKS Book: Every AKS Decision That Will Save You a Cluster Rebuild It’s out now. More info 👇 pixelrobots.co.uk/2026/03/the-ak… #AKS #PlatformEngineering #Kubernetes

this is a visual metaphor for spending $10,000 on claude tokens and shipping nothing

If you're attending KubeCon in Amsterdam and you want to meet with the AKS Engineering Team, here is your chance. We're inviting AKS customers for 1-1 meetings to hear about your experiences. Space is limited. Send me a DM if you're interested. #KubeCon

🚀 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗕𝗹𝗼𝗴 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗔𝘇𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗦𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲! 👉 𝗛𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝟮𝟬/𝟮𝟬: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝘇𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗼𝘆𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗠𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗪𝗲 𝗔𝗹𝗹 𝗠𝗮𝗱𝗲 🔗 azurealan.ie/2026/03/13/hin… #AzureSpringClean #Azure

@anthonymashford Nice colour.

I’ll just leave this here #Ducati

@ibuildthecloud Nothing wrong with windows. I built radar.kubebuddy.io on windows. And the cli tool to go with it kubebuddy.io

I feel like I have to defend myself constantly that I'm working on a Windows laptop. I'm still cool people. I haven't lost my linux card. I do everything in WSL2. Please don't kick me out of the club. I just really wanted an arm64 laptop.

@ibuildthecloud @esotericmeans @thdxr Oh nice. That is cool. They are so huge. We have loads up here in the north east.

@Pixel_Robots @esotericmeans @thdxr 🤯You got it. It's a windmill. At the time when we drew it we were working with a company that was putting k8s inside of power generating windmills. You don't realize how big those things are and they have like a tiny datacenter worth of compute in them.

i thought i was out i stayed out of the game for 7 years but here we go again

@ibuildthecloud @esotericmeans @thdxr I always thought it was just a k but bent a bit to show 3 prongs. It also looks like a wind turbine.

@Pixel_Robots @esotericmeans @thdxr Trivia time, what to guess what the k3s logo is supposed to actually be? Hint, it's not a flux capacitor :)

@ibuildthecloud @esotericmeans @thdxr I do like the yellow.

@esotericmeans @thdxr Lol the website still hasn't changed.

🎉 IT'S OFFICIAL: @wiz_io joins @Google to secure the AI era. This is a massive moment for our customers and our team. Thank you to every customer, partner, and Wizard who made this moment possible 💙 We can't wait to share what's next. wiz.io/blog/google-cl…

The cattle-vs-pets problem, now with Kubernetes clusters. Non-prod that hasn't been rebuilt in months isn't validating anything. It's drift waiting to bite you. engineeringclouds.io/ephemeral-by-d… #MVPBuzz #Azure #Kubernetes #CloudNative #Cloud #AKS #DevOps

From the Blog: Azure Spring Clean 2026: OpenTelemetry Metrics Link: blog.builtwithcaffeine.cloud/posts/azure-sp… #Community #CloudFamily #BuiltWithCaffeine

Proud to see Azure Quick Review as part of the Azure Compliance skill! #azqr #Azure #BestPractices 👇 github.com/microsoft/azur…