ASO v2.18 Release Notes

Release notes for Azure Service Operator v2.18.0

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

We’re excited to announce the release of Azure Service Operator v2.18.0! This release adds new AKS preview API support, expands simplified versioning to storage resources, strengthens reconciliation checks, fixes Helm configurability issues, and updates a broad set of dependencies and tooling.

🎇 Headline Features

The storage group now supports simplified API versioning. You can use all storage resources with the new v prefix, while the legacy v1api versions remain available for backward compatibility. This continues our transition toward simplified versioning across all resource groups (see #4831 for more detail).

ASO now issues a fresh GET on the owner ARM resource before calling PreReconcileOwnerCheck, ensuring the check always operates on the latest owner status (#5140). This should result in faster goal state convergence for complex resource graphs.

Support for the allowMultiEnvManagement configuration flag allows per-namespace/per-resource Azure cloud environment settings, allowing users to manage resources across different Azure clouds/environments.

Special thanks to subhamrajvanshi for this contribution.

ASO no longer gives up retrying on common Azure errors, improving reliability for long-running operations in ASO. ASO will currently still give up retrying on some well-known non-retryable errors.

Before issuing a DELETE request to Azure, ASO may now check if the resource or the resource’s parent has already been removed. We will progressively enable this for all resources over the next few releases.

⚠️ Breaking changes

This release includes breaking changes. Please review breaking changes in v2.18 before upgrading.

The containerservice ManagedCluster and AgentPool API versions v1api20230201 and v1api20231001 have been removed, as previously announced.
The API version 2024-01-01-preview of insights has been removed as it was deprecated and removed upstream by Azure. Users of this API version should move to a supported version before upgrading ASO.

In ASO v2.19, we will remove containerservice ManagedCluster and AgentPool API version v1api20240402preview.

🎉 New and improved resource support

You can now use the latest AKS preview features through containerservice v20251002preview.

Several insights resources now use their latest ARM API versions (#5136):

DataCollectionEndpoint, DataCollectionRule, and DataCollectionRuleAssociation now target API version 2024-03-11
ScheduledQueryRule now targets 2025-01-01-preview

New AppConfiguration child resources using the latest 2024-06-01 API version have been added to address the requests for KeyValue management capabilities. These resources include KeyValue, Replica, and Snapshot.

The Version value for dbformysql.FlexibleServer has been changed to a simple string to allow new server versions to be used without the need for an API upgrade.

🐛 Bug fixes

The Helm chart metrics port is now fully configurable. Previously, the metrics.port value in values.yaml was ignored in favor of a hardcoded 8443.
- Special thanks to bingikarthik for the contribution!
4 known cases where the ARM ID properties were released without being properly tagged-as/converted-to KnownResourceReference structs were fixed. To avoid potential breakage, users can add the correct ResourceReference property alongside the legacy property.

🙏 Thank You

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! A special thanks goes to bingikarthik and subhamrajvanshi for their contributions to this release.

See the Full Release notes on GitHub.