Hi @c2_confluent
Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A platform.
It seems that you are trying to use a specific version of coredns on your AKS, correct me if I'm wrong.
Please note that AKS uses specific versions of the coreDNS on each release, and if you edit them, they will fall down to the configured version on AKS.
You can find here which version is deployed and used in each version of AKS.
https://github.com/Azure/AKS/releases, for ex, latest AKS version is v1.9.4-hotfix.20240704.
This cannot/should be changed from your end, since you may enter in an unsupported scenario.
If you have any questions, please drop a comment by tagging my userid @anrodrigues-MSFT
If this does answer your question, please accept it as the answer as a token of appreciation.