Troubleshooting outbound connectivity points in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is usually a daunting activity attributable to its layered nature. To assist professionals, Microsoft has introduced the “Connectivity Evaluation” characteristic in public preview to simplify the troubleshooting course of. The brand new instrument is built-in into the AKS Portal and leverages the Azure Digital Community Verifier engine. It is ready to analyze community configurations while not having to generate dwell visitors.

Whereas it’s a useful instrument, Microsoft does be aware that the characteristic’s scope is presently restricted to outbound connectivity from node swimming pools to the general public web and that it does not analyze third-party or exterior community sources.

The Connectivity Evaluation instrument can be utilized to confirm if visitors is being blocked by quite a lot of Azure sources reminiscent of Load Balancers, Firewalls, NSGs, and route tables. It could possibly assist to troubleshoot widespread points together with EgressBlocked circumstances, failed picture pulls from container registries, and unreachable webhooks.

The characteristic additionally offers a community circulate diagram and detailed JSON output to assist pinpoint the precise community element inflicting the problem. Microsoft’s announcement does point out that the instrument, nevertheless, does have some limitations, together with unsupported areas for CNI Overlay clusters, however this might be coming in early September. Concerning help for CNI Overlay clusters, it is solely accessible within the West US, West US 2, and South Central US areas. There are additionally person interface enhancements within the pipeline, however they’re not accessible but.

Microsoft stated that it’s seeking to help different forms of evaluation too and there are additionally plans to have help for connectivity evaluation from a node pool to the API server and in-cluster node-to-node visitors. With this stated, there isn’t a particular timeline from Microsoft for these future options. To be taught extra about easy methods to use the brand new instrument, try Microsoft’s announcement for detailed step-by-step directions.