AKS Desktop v0.9.0 improves multi-tenant Azure support, upgrades the AI Assistant preview, introduces privacy-conscious usage telemetry controls, and moves the underlying Headlamp experience to version 0.43.
✨ Highlights
Multi-tenant AKS cluster registration
AKS Desktop now supports selecting an Azure tenant before selecting a subscription when registering an AKS cluster.
- Subscriptions are filtered to the selected tenant, making it easier to find clusters across multi-tenant Azure environments.
- When all available subscriptions belong to one tenant, that tenant is selected automatically.
- Changing the tenant resets the subscription and cluster selections to prevent mismatched registrations.
- Tenant information is obtained from the existing subscription lookup, so this does not add another Azure CLI request.
Added in #733.
AI Assistant 0.3.0-alpha (Preview)
The AI Assistant preview has been upgraded to the shared Headlamp AI Assistant 0.3.0-alpha implementation, bringing a more extensible foundation for Kubernetes troubleshooting and natural-language cluster management.
- Adds Holmes Agent mode, allowing AKS Desktop to connect to a HolmesGPT agent running in a cluster for enhanced Kubernetes diagnostics.
- Adds desktop support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, including configuration through a form or JSON editor, automatic tool discovery, per-tool enablement, input schema visibility, usage statistics, and bulk enable or disable actions.
- Expands model provider support with DeepSeek and OpenAI-compatible endpoints, alongside OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Gemini, and local models through Ollama.
- Retains context-aware cluster questions, Kubernetes resource generation, log interpretation, and configuration analysis through the updated shared AI UI and runtime.
- Restores localized AI Assistant catalogs for supported languages.
- Hardens secret redaction, HTML and URL handling, untrusted input parsing, filenames, endpoint normalization, and MCP state handling.
- Uses the canonical @headlamp-k8s/ai-assistant package identity so Electron command permissions are granted only to the expected plugin package.
The AI Assistant remains an alpha preview. Using external model providers may require API credentials and may incur provider charges.
Implemented in #770, with the supporting Headlamp package identity and permission changes in #768.
Anonymous usage telemetry and controls
Anonymous product usage telemetry has been restored with additional privacy safeguards.
- Telemetry uses a fixed set of typed, sanitized events for application usage, enabled plugins, feature usage, errors, and general cluster characteristics.
- Automatic request, cookie, route, and browser exception collection is disabled.
- Cluster information is limited to generalized values such as Kubernetes version, Azure region, service tier, and bucketed node or namespace counts.
- A pseudonymous installation identifier is used to distinguish installations without collecting user identity.
- A final privacy scrubber removes unsafe filesystem paths, URLs, identifiers, route values, IP or geolocation fields, and exception data before telemetry is sent.
- Initial lifecycle telemetry is limited to AKS project creation or import and application deployment workflows.
- Telemetry is enabled by default and can be disabled under Settings → Plugins → AKS Desktop → Send anonymous usage data.
- Changes to the telemetry setting take effect after restarting AKS Desktop.
Implemented in #718, with follow-up fixes in #745 and additional privacy hardening in #773.
Headlamp 0.43 foundation
AKS Desktop now incorporates the Headlamp 0.43 codebase, bringing a large set of Kubernetes UI, accessibility, and reliability improvements.
Notable additions include:
- Node upgrade visualization showing progress through cordon, drain, delete, reimage, and completion stages.
- Workload diagnostics on Pod and workload detail pages, providing troubleshooting hints based on status, events, and container information.
- Dry-run support for validating YAML changes and previewing workload rollbacks before applying them.
- Batch scaling for multiple Deployments, StatefulSets, or ReplicaSets.
- Saved Advanced Search queries, including support for restoring, renaming, and deleting saved searches.
- A dedicated Job details view with status information and direct access to related Pod logs.
- A new form for creating Deployments directly from the UI.
- Node pool information in Node list and detail views.
- Node information in the cluster overview Events table.
- Additional resource details matching information commonly shown by kubectl describe.
See the Headlamp 0.43 release notes for the complete upstream list.
🐞 Fixes and reliability improvements
The Headlamp update also includes numerous fixes that improve everyday cluster management:
- Resource updates now use JSON Patch, reducing 409 Conflict errors when editing frequently changing resources such as HPAs.
- Fixed crashes when entering incomplete YAML in the resource creation dialog.
- Fixed stale Pod status indicators after readiness checks complete.
- Fixed resource-map loading and rendering issues, including missing relationships and unsupported Gateway API filters.
- Improved Job and DaemonSet log access.
- Fixed memory and subscription leaks in log viewing, WebSocket handling, OAuth, node draining, and port forwarding.
- Improved OIDC compatibility, including authentication with public providers such as Microsoft Entra ID when no custom CA is configured.
- Improved cluster chooser search and keyboard navigation.
- Table pagination preferences and Pod log formatting preferences now persist between sessions.
- Improved screen-reader announcements for empty tables and several other keyboard and high-zoom accessibility scenarios.
- Fixed error and warning icons in Project resource views.
- Fixed startup failures caused by malformed settings stored in local storage.
- Improved Windows path handling and application shutdown behavior on Windows and Linux.
The Headlamp fork was rebased onto version 0.43 in #741, with downstream compatibility and build fixes in #756.
🔧 Build and dependency updates
- Updated the backend build to Go 1.26 to match the upgraded Headlamp backend requirements in #762.
- Updated actions/checkout from 6.0.3 to 7.0.0 in #738.
- Updated actions/setup-go from 6.4.0 to 6.5.0 in #742.
- Updated step-security/harden-runner from 2.19.4 to 2.20.0 in #758.
- Updated @types/node from 25.8.0 to 26.0.0 in #739.
- Updated lint-staged from 17.0.7 to 17.0.8 in #743.
- Updated tsx from 4.22.3 to 4.22.4 in #708.
Full Changelog: https://github.com/Azure/aks-desktop/compare/v0.8.0...v0.9.0
