Upgrading EKS Clusters
The Kubernetes community will release a new version of Kubernetes approximately three times a year, as well as maintain release branches for the three most recent minor releases. In addition, AWS will maintain at least four production-ready versions of Kubernetes at any given time; at the time of writing, they are versions 1.24, 1.23, 1.22, and 1.21. Given these two different release schedules, at some point, you will need to upgrade your EKS clusters either because you want to use a new feature developed by the Kubernetes community or because AWS is no longer supporting the version you are using. The good news is that as EKS is a managed service, AWS does most of the upgrade work for you!
This chapter looks at the best way to do this and the impact it can have on running workloads. Specifically, we will cover the following:
- Reasons for upgrading EKS and key areas to focus on
- How to do in-place upgrades of the control plane
- Upgrading nodes...