Azure Linux with OS Guard for AKS node pools is retiring — support ends December 10, 2026

One fresh, dated announcement tonight: Microsoft is retiring Azure Linux with OS Guard (preview) as a node pool OS in Azure Kubernetes Service. Support ends December 10, 2026 (no new pools, no new node images, no security patches) and the node images are removed on March 10, 2027, after which scaling and remediation on affected pools fail. Azure Container Linux is the replacement.

Tonight’s monitored sources surfaced one genuinely new, officially-dated sunset, and it entered the archive. No corrections are outstanding. The three re-verification flags were again the Microsoft pages that render their dates in JavaScript (Sentinel SAP connector agent, Azure Automation Python/PowerShell runtimes, Exchange Web Services) — each re-confirmed correct by hand against Microsoft’s release-communications API, so they are not data errors. The one fresh discovery-scan hit, a personal-blog proposal to soft-deprecate Python’s re.match(), has no official vendor announcement or date, so it was not turned into an entry.

New: Azure Linux with OS Guard in AKS — support ends December 10, 2026

Microsoft is retiring Azure Linux with OS Guard as a node pool operating system in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Per the official Azure Updates notice, the option is in preview, and Azure Container Linux is the named replacement.

It winds down in two stages. December 10, 2026 — support ends: no new Azure Linux with OS Guard node pools, no new node images for existing pools, and no more security patches. March 10, 2027 — AKS removes the node images entirely, after which scaling and remediation operations on affected pools, including reimage and redeploy, will fail.

This is narrowly scoped to teams that opted into this preview OS SKU, typically for its hardened posture. Standard Azure Linux and Ubuntu node pools are unaffected. If you do run it, inventory which node pools use it (the node pool OS SKU, e.g. az aks nodepool list) and migrate them to Azure Container Linux using Microsoft’s migration tutorial — before December to keep security patches, and well before March 2027 to keep the pools able to scale and self-heal.

On the board

14 September: the Relay app and Microsoft Sentinel SAP connector agent retirements.
17 September: the Azure Maps Render v1 API retirement.
24 September: OpenAI’s Sora 2 video API shutdown.

Further out: a cluster on 30 September, Exchange Web Services in Exchange Online (1 October), the GitHub Copilot model deprecations (2 October), OpenAI’s 23 October API removals, then .NET 8 and 9 end of support (10 November) and PostgreSQL 14 end-of-life (12 November). The full board with live countdowns is on the calendar.