Channels Prod and Non-prod for customers assign to their prod, non-prod resources

[Demetrio Costa (demcost)]

Why don´t we create channels like prod and non-prod for customers assign to their (prod, non-prod ) resources and have opportunity to test some features in advance? I have opportunity to work with large cx that was impacted for different types of updates that happened on our platform and that caused impact when reached production environments.

[Renato Pagan (renatopagan)]

In enterprise scenarios, it is very common for customers to maintain separate AKS clusters for different environments, such as pre-production and production, to enforce proper validation and change management practices.
Currently, when Microsoft performs automatic updates to managed components (for example, Managed Ingress using NGINX images), these updates may be rolled out to clusters in a non-deterministic order. As a result, we have observed cases where the production environment receives the update before the pre-production environment and may break customer applications.
This behavior introduces operational risk, as customers are not able to validate changes in a controlled environment prior to impacting production workloads. For mission-critical systems, this breaks a fundamental expectation of safe deployment practices.

Suggested improvement:
It would be highly valuable to provide customers with the ability to control the rollout sequence of such updates.
For example:

Support for deployment channels or waves (e.g., Wave 1, Wave 2)
Allow customers to assign clusters to specific waves

    Pre-production clusters → Wave 1
    Production clusters → Wave 2 (with a configurable delay, such as a few days)

This capability would enable:

  Proper validation and testing in pre-production
  Reduced risk when applying platform-driven updates
  Alignment with standard enterprise change management processes

This feature would significantly improve customer confidence and adoption for mission-critical workloads running on AKS.