Microsoft has released Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Automatic to general availability, introducing a fully managed Kubernetes offering designed to eliminate operational overhead while maintaining the full power and flexibility of the platform. The service represents Microsoft's answer to what the company calls the "Kubernetes tax"-the significant time and expertise traditionally required to configure, secure, and maintain production-grade clusters. AKS Automatic differentiates itself by providing production-ready clusters through intelligent defaults and automated operations.
After switching to Karpenter with about 70% spot instance usage, our monthly compute costs dropped by 70%. That's a significant reduction that freed up substantial budget for new features and infrastructure improvements. Burninova's implementation involved replacing the traditional Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler with Karpenter, and also moving to multi-architecture setup with both AMD64 and ARM64 instances.