Reasons for upgrading EKS and key areas to focus on

EKS is a community project and, as such, it is constantly evolving; big releases currently happen approximately three times per year and normally contain at least one major change. For example, 1.21, released in April 2021, deprecated Pod security policies in favor of external admission control. This means that you will need to take advantage of newer Kubernetes features at some point. In addition, the Kubernetes community only supports the most recent three minor releases (for example, 1.25, 1.24, and 1.23), with older releases normally getting 1 year of patch releases, after which you are on your own!

Amazon takes the upstream Kubernetes release, tests and validates it with the AWS platform and components such as the AWS VPC CNI, and so on, and packages and releases it as an EKS release. This process takes roughly 6 months after the Kubernetes community release and will normally be supported for 14 months. This is illustrated...