Understanding managed nodes with eksctl

A managed node group leverages auto scaling groups to provide the basic functionality used to do upgrades and modifications to worker nodes. Each auto scaling group specifies a launch template, which specifies the configuration options.

If you replace the launch configuration—changing the EKS AMI ID, for example—any new instances that are created use the new launch template and, therefore, the new AMI. You can then terminate old instances, and the auto scaling group will automatically replace them using the new launch template. This process is automated for managed node groups, and the EKS control plane performs the following steps for a managed node group:

1. It randomly selects a node and drains the Pods from the node.
2. It ordons the node after every Pod is evicted so that the Kubernetes scheduler doesn’t send any new requests to this node and removes this node from its list of active nodes.
3. It sends a termination...