Amazon EKS: Simplified Kubernetes Management

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provides a fully managed Kubernetes service that eliminates the complexity of operating Kubernetes clusters. With EKS, you can:

Deploy applications faster with less operational overhead

Scale seamlessly to meet changing workload demands

Improve security through AWS integration and automated updates

Choose between standard EKS or fully automated EKS Auto Mode

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is the premiere platform for running Kubernetes clusters, both in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and in your own data centers (EKS Anywhere and Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes).

Amazon EKS simplifies building, securing, and maintaining Kubernetes clusters. It can be more cost effective at providing enough resources to meet peak demand than maintaining your own data centers. Two of the main approaches to using Amazon EKS are as follows:

EKS standard: AWS manages the Kubernetes control plane when you create a cluster with EKS. Components that manage nodes, schedule workloads, integrate with the AWS cloud, and store and scale control plane information to keep your clusters up and running, are handled for you automatically.

EKS Auto Mode: Using the EKS Auto Mode feature, EKS extends its control to manage Nodes (Kubernetes data plane) as well. It simplifies Kubernetes management by automatically provisioning infrastructure, selecting optimal compute instances, dynamically scaling resources, continuously optimizing costs, patching operating systems, and integrating with AWS security services.

The following diagram illustrates how Amazon EKS integrates your Kubernetes clusters with the AWS cloud, depending on which method of cluster creation you choose:

Amazon EKS helps you remove friction and accelerate time to production, improve performance, availability and resiliency, and enhance system security. For more information, see Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.

Building and scaling with Kubernetes: Amazon EKS Capabilities

Amazon EKS not only helps you build and manage clusters, it helps you build and scale application systems with Kubernetes. Amazon EKS Capabilities are fully managed cluster services that extend your cluster’s functionality with hands-free Kubernetes-native tools, including:

Argo CD: Argo CD provides declarative, GitOps-based continuous deployment for your workloads, AWS resources, and cloud infrastructure.

** AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK)**: ACK enables Kubernetes-native creation and lifecycle management of AWS resources, unifying workload orchestration and Infrastructure-as-code workflows.

kro (Kube Resource Orchestrator): kro extends native Kubernetes features to simplify custom resource creation, orchestration, and compositions, giving you the tools to create your own customized cloud building blocks.

EKS Capabilities are cloud resources that minimize the operational burden of installing, maintaining, and scaling these foundational platform components in your clusters, letting you focus on building software rather than cluster platform operations.

To learn more, see EKS Capabilities.

Features of Amazon EKS

Amazon EKS provides the following high-level features:

Management interfaces

EKS offers multiple interfaces to provision, manage, and maintain clusters, including AWS Management Console, Amazon EKS API/SDKs, CDK, AWS CLI, eksctl CLI, AWS CloudFormation, and Terraform. For more information, see Get started with Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS cluster lifecycle and configuration.

Access control tools

EKS relies on both Kubernetes and AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) features to manage access from users and workloads. For more information, see Grant IAM users and roles access to Kubernetes APIs and Grant Kubernetes workloads access to AWS using Kubernetes Service Accounts.

Compute resources

For compute resources, EKS allows the full range of Amazon EC2 instance types and AWS innovations such as Nitro and Graviton with Amazon EKS for you to optimize the compute for your workloads. For more information, see Manage compute resources by using nodes.

Storage

EKS Auto Mode automatically creates storage classes using EBS volumes. Using Container Storage Interface (CSI) drivers, you can also use Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, Amazon FSX, and Amazon File Cache for your application storage needs. For more information, see Use application data storage for your cluster.

Security

The shared responsibility model is employed as it relates to Security in Amazon EKS. For more information, see Security best practices, Infrastructure security, and Kubernetes security.

Monitoring tools

Use the observability dashboard to monitor Amazon EKS clusters. Monitoring tools include Prometheus, CloudWatch, Cloudtrail, and ADOT Operator. For more information on dashboards, metrics servers, and other tools, see EKS cluster costs and Kubernetes Metrics Server.

Cluster capabilities

EKS provides managed cluster capabilities for continuous deployment, cloud resource management, and resource composition based on open source innovations. EKS installs Kubernetes APIs in your clusters, but controllers and other components run in EKS and are fully managed, providing automated patching, scaling, and monitoring. For more information, see EKS Capabilities.

Kubernetes compatibility and support

Amazon EKS is certified Kubernetes-conformant, so you can deploy Kubernetes-compatible applications without refactoring and use Kubernetes community tooling and plugins. EKS offers both standard support and extended support for Kubernetes. For more information, see Understand the Kubernetes version lifecycle on EKS.

Services to use with Amazon EKS

You can use other AWS services with the clusters that you deploy using Amazon EKS:

Amazon EKS Pricing

Amazon EKS has per cluster pricing based on Kubernetes cluster version support, pricing for Amazon EKS Auto Mode, and per vCPU pricing for Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes.

When using Amazon EKS, you pay separately for the AWS resources you use to run your applications on Kubernetes worker nodes. For example, if you are running Kubernetes worker nodes as Amazon EC2 instances with Amazon EBS volumes and public IPv4 addresses, you are charged for the instance capacity through Amazon EC2, the volume capacity through Amazon EBS, and the IPv4 address through Amazon VPC.

Visit the respective pricing pages of the AWS services you are using with your Kubernetes applications for detailed pricing information.

For Amazon EKS cluster, Amazon EKS Auto Mode, Amazon EKS Capabilities, and Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes pricing, see Amazon EKS Pricing.

For Amazon EC2 pricing, see Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing and Amazon EC2 Spot Pricing.

For AWS Fargate pricing, see AWS Fargate Pricing.

You can use your savings plans for compute used in Amazon EKS clusters. For more information, see Pricing with Savings Plans.