Aks Version upgrade

Question

Hello Team

We got email from Microsoft Azure as

Upgrade your AKS Kubernetes version before 02 April 2023
You're receiving this email because you are using the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
AKS is retiring v1.23.x on 2 April 2023. We've detected that one or more AKS clusters in your subscription(s) are using Kubernetes v1.23.x or lower. Please upgrade your clusters to 1.24.x or higher by 2 April 2023, when we are trying to upgrade the versions through Azure portal, the below versions were shown. which version we need to upgrade? & we could not see the next minor version after our current version 1.22.6.

Answer 1

Hello Krishna,

Thanks for reaching out and I hope you are doing well.

We only show the oldest supported version when upgrading a cluster. AKS 1.22.x is completely out of support, so you won't see any minor versions listed in the drop-down. Details can be found here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/supported-kubernetes-versions?tabs=azure-cli#what-happens-when-a-user-upgrades-a-kubernetes-cluster-with-a-minor-version-that-isnt-supported

You can either go to 1.23.12 or 1.23.15 and after that you can go to 1.24.x as 1.23.x will be out of support in April. Below link explains how the upgrade process works when using unsupported versions:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/upgrade-cluster?tabs=azure-cli#check-for-available-aks-cluster-upgrades

We always recommend using the newest Kubernetes versions as that includes the latest fixes and features. We have an auto upgrade feature in case you are interested:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/auto-upgrade-cluster

As a final recommendation, do not upgrade a production cluster without testing the upgrade process in Dev or QA first. Some APIs get deprecated with newest K8s versions, so it is better to test everything first. List of deprecated APIs based on K8s versions:

https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/using-api/deprecation-guide/

Please "Accept the answer" if the information helped you. This will help us and others in the community as well. Feel free to reply with any other questions or concerns.

Hope this helps!