AWS History and Timeline regarding Amazon EKS - Overview, Functions, Features, Summary of Updates, and Introduction

First Published:
Last Updated:

This is another installment in the series that I started with the "AWS History and Timeline - Almost All AWS Services List, Announcements, General Availability(GA)", where I extract features from the history and timeline of AWS services (I've previously written about Amazon S3, AWS Systems Manager, Amazon Route 53, Amazon EventBridge, AWS KMS, Amazon SQS, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Cognito).

This time, I have created a historical timeline for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), the managed Kubernetes service that AWS announced as a preview at re:Invent on November 29, 2017 and made generally available on June 5, 2018.
Just like before, I am summarizing the main features while following the birth of Amazon EKS and tracking its feature additions and updates as a Current Overview, Functions, Features of Amazon EKS.
In particular, I have tried to organize the timeline so that you can quickly answer the questions that platform engineers and Kubernetes operators are most often asked, such as "When did EKS support Fargate?", "When did EKS Pod Identity launch as a simpler alternative to IRSA?", "When did EKS Auto Mode launch?", and "When did EKS Hybrid Nodes launch?"
I hope these will provide clues as to what has remained the same and what has changed, in addition to the features and concepts of each AWS service.

Background and Method of Creating Amazon EKS Historical Timeline

The reason for creating a historical timeline of Amazon EKS this time is that Amazon EKS has effectively become the de facto standard for running Kubernetes on AWS, and its scope has grown well beyond a managed control plane.

The original 2018 release was a control plane that you connected your own self-managed Amazon EC2 worker nodes to. Almost eight years later, Amazon EKS now spans managed node groups, AWS Fargate, EKS Anywhere (on-premises VMware, bare metal, Nutanix, Apache CloudStack, AWS Snow), AWS Outposts local clusters, AWS Local Zones, AWS Wavelength Zones, EKS Hybrid Nodes (your own on-premises hardware connected to a cloud control plane), and EKS Auto Mode (fully managed compute, storage, and networking using EC2 managed instances).
The identity story has also evolved from kubeconfig plus the aws-auth ConfigMap to IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA), Access Entries, and EKS Pod Identity.

Therefore, I wanted to organize the information of Amazon EKS with the following approaches.
  • Tracking the history of Amazon EKS and organizing the transition of updates
  • Summarizing the feature list and characteristics of Amazon EKS
This timeline primarily references the following blogs and document content regarding Amazon EKS.
There may be slight variations in the dates on the timeline due to differences in the timing of announcements or article postings in the references used.
The content posted is limited to major features related to the current Amazon EKS and necessary for the feature list and overview description.
In other words, please note that the items on this timeline are not all updates to Amazon EKS features, but are representative updates that I have picked out.
Routine items such as new Kubernetes patch versions, security CVE-only platform versions, and small per-region add-on availability changes are intentionally omitted so that the timeline stays focused on the milestones that shaped the service.

Amazon EKS Historical Timeline (Updates from June 5, 2018)

Now, here is a timeline related to the functions of Amazon EKS. As of the time of writing this article, the history of Amazon EKS spans about 8 years and 5 months from its preview announcement on November 29, 2017 and almost 8 years from its general availability on June 5, 2018.

Jump to year: 2017 · 2018 · 2019 · 2020 · 2021 · 2022 · 2023 · 2024 · 2025 · 2026

* The table can be sorted by clicking on the column names.
Date Summary
2017-11-29 Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is announced as a preview at AWS re:Invent 2017. EKS provides a managed control plane that runs upstream open-source Kubernetes, with planned integrations including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon VPC, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, AWS PrivateLink, and AWS Fargate.
2018-06-05 Amazon EKS becomes generally available (GA). The Kubernetes control plane (API server, scheduler, controller manager, and etcd) runs across three Availability Zones, with automatic control plane node replacement, patching, and version upgrades. EKS uses the Heptio Authenticator (later upstream as aws-iam-authenticator) so that AWS IAM identities can authenticate to the cluster, and integrates with AWS Network Load Balancer, AWS Application Load Balancer, and Classic Load Balancer for traffic ingress.
2018-07-10 The build scripts for the Amazon EKS-optimized Amazon Linux AMI are open-sourced on GitHub as amazon-eks-ami.
2018-08-22 The EKS-optimized AMI gains GPU support with a new variant for Amazon EC2 P2/P3 instances.
2018-08-31 Platform version is updated to add support for the Kubernetes API aggregation layer and the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA).
2018-09-05 Amazon EKS is available in the Europe (Ireland) Region (eu-west-1).
2018-09-21 The AWS CLI adds the aws eks update-kubeconfig command to simplify creating a kubeconfig file for cluster access.
2018-10-10 Platform version 1.10-eks.2 adds support for the MutatingAdmissionWebhook and ValidatingAdmissionWebhook admission controllers.
2018-10-16 Amazon VPC CNI plugin version 1.2.1 supports custom network configuration for secondary Pod ENIs.
2018-11-20 The AWS ALB Ingress Controller releases version 1.0.0 with formal AWS support (the predecessor of the AWS Load Balancer Controller).
2018-12-11 Amazon EKS is available in the Europe (Stockholm) Region (eu-north-1).
2018-12-12 Documentation is added for Kubernetes cluster version updates and worker node replacement workflows.
2018-12-19 Amazon EKS is available in Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney).
2019-09-03 IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA) is introduced. Amazon EKS hosts a public OIDC discovery endpoint per cluster so that Kubernetes ServiceAccount tokens can be exchanged for AWS IAM role credentials via an IAM trust policy. Available on EKS Kubernetes 1.14 and on clusters updated to 1.13 or later on or after this date.
2019-10-08 Amazon EKS announces general availability of Windows nodes for clusters running Kubernetes 1.14 or later, allowing Windows and Linux containers to run side by side in the same EKS cluster.
2019-11-18 Amazon EKS managed node groups become generally available. EKS provisions and manages the Amazon EC2 instances and the Auto Scaling group, with one-step create / update / terminate operations and automatic node draining during version upgrades.
2019-12-03 Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate becomes generally available at AWS re:Invent 2019, allowing Kubernetes pods to run on AWS Fargate without managing the underlying EC2 instances. Initial Regions are US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).
2019-12-03 Amazon EKS adds support for creating clusters on AWS Outposts with self-managed worker nodes.
2020-03-10 Bottlerocket is announced as an open-source Linux-based operating system purpose-built to run containers, intended for use with services such as Amazon EKS.
2020-08-03 AWS Fargate publishes CloudWatch usage metrics for Fargate On-Demand resources, providing visibility into Fargate consumption per account.
2020-08-17 Amazon EKS support for ARM-based instances powered by AWS Graviton becomes generally available for managed and self-managed node groups on EKS Kubernetes 1.15 and later.
2020-08-17 Amazon EFS support for AWS Fargate is added, making it possible to use Amazon EFS for persistent storage with Fargate pods.
2020-08-18 AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS adds support for capacity Reservations using launch templates and managed node groups, including launch template parameter customization.
2020-08-31 Bottlerocket support is added to EKS for deploying self-managed nodes that run Bottlerocket as the host operating system.
2020-10-23 Network Load Balancer (NLB) IP targets are supported on Amazon EKS, so that NLBs can route directly to Fargate pods or to pods running on Amazon EC2 nodes.
2020-12-01 Amazon EKS Distro (EKS-D) is announced and open-sourced at AWS re:Invent 2020. EKS-D is the same Kubernetes distribution that powers Amazon EKS, packaged for customers to run themselves on-premises, on Snowball Edge, or in other clouds, starting from Kubernetes v1.18.
2020-12-01 Amazon EKS Anywhere is announced at AWS re:Invent 2020 as a future deployment option to create and operate Kubernetes clusters on customer-managed infrastructure, with optional AWS Support.
2020-12-01 The AWS Management Console can display details for managed, self-managed, and Fargate nodes and Kubernetes workloads in an EKS cluster.
2020-12-08 Spot Instance support is added to managed node groups, complementing the existing On-Demand support.
2021-05-11 Node taints for managed node groups are supported, so that node groups can be tainted at creation time.
2021-06-01 Security groups for pods are supported on AWS Fargate, extending the existing capability beyond Amazon EC2 nodes.
2021-07-19 A containerd runtime bootstrap flag is added to the EKS-optimized accelerated Amazon Linux AMI and to Bottlerocket AMIs, allowing customers to opt in to the containerd runtime ahead of the Kubernetes-wide Dockershim removal.
2021-08-30 Managed node groups now auto-calculate the EKS-recommended maximum pods per node when no launch template AMI is specified.
2021-09-08 Amazon EKS Anywhere becomes generally available, initially on VMware vSphere. Amazon EKS Connector is also announced as a public preview, enabling any Kubernetes cluster (EKS Anywhere, self-managed on EC2, other clouds) to be visible in the EKS console.
2021-10-28 Bottlerocket is supported as an AMI type for managed node groups, removing the need to self-manage Bottlerocket nodes.
2021-11-10 The Fluent Bit Kubernetes filter is supported for Fargate logging.
2021-11-29 Karpenter v0.5 is announced as production-ready at AWS re:Invent 2021 as an open-source, high-performance Kubernetes cluster autoscaler integrated with Amazon EKS.
2021-12-22 Amazon EKS launches IPv6 support for pods through the Amazon VPC CNI plugin. The corresponding AWS What's New announcement is published in January 2022.
2022-03-22 Documentation is added for deploying an Amazon EKS cluster on AWS Outposts, with a refreshed deployment guide.
2022-04-01 Pod patching behavior for AWS Fargate is documented: during upgrades, EKS evicts pods using pod disruption budgets and emits events that can be observed via Amazon EventBridge rules.
2022-08-16 Wildcards are supported in Fargate profile selectors for namespaces, label keys, and label values.
2022-08-23 Amazon EKS Anywhere on bare metal becomes generally available, adding bare-metal hardware as a deployment target alongside VMware vSphere.
2022-09-08 AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS transitions from pod-based to vCPU-based service quotas.
2022-09-19 Amazon EKS local clusters on AWS Outposts become generally available, allowing the entire Kubernetes cluster including the control plane to run on an Outposts rack for disconnected or low-latency edge use cases.
2022-12-15 Amazon EKS managed node groups support Windows.
2023-03-01 Amazon EKS local clusters on AWS Outposts support Kubernetes versions 1.22 - 1.25.
2023-05-30 Windows managed node groups become available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.
2023-07-31 Configurable ephemeral storage is supported for AWS Fargate pods on Amazon EKS, raising the per-pod ephemeral storage cap.
2023-10-04 Amazon EKS Extended Support for Kubernetes versions is available as a public preview, providing an additional 12 months of support beyond the 14-month standard window, for a total of 26 months per minor version starting with Kubernetes 1.23.
2023-10-04 Karpenter graduates its APIs from alpha to beta and AWS contributes the vendor-neutral core of the project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
2023-11-26 Amazon EKS Pod Identity launches at AWS re:Invent 2023 as a simpler alternative to IRSA. EKS Pod Identity uses an EKS-native service principal and the EKS Pod Identity Agent DaemonSet so that one IAM role can be reused across clusters without modifying its trust policy, and it supports IAM role session tags.
2023-12-18 Amazon EKS Access Entries launch, replacing the aws-auth ConfigMap as the recommended way to grant AWS IAM principals access to a cluster. A new API authentication mode lets administrators manage cluster access entirely through EKS APIs.
2023-12-20 Amazon EKS cluster insights launch, providing automatic, recurring checks of cluster configuration and upgrade readiness against an AWS-curated list of insights.
2023-12-28 Amazon EKS cluster health detection becomes available for clusters in AWS Regions, surfacing infrastructure-prerequisite issues in the EKS API and console (previously only available for EKS local clusters on Outposts).
2024-01-16 Amazon EKS Extended Support for Kubernetes versions becomes generally available, applicable to Kubernetes 1.21 and higher, with paid support pricing taking effect from the April 2024 billing cycle for Kubernetes 1.23 and higher (1.21 and 1.22 starting May 2024).
2024-01-23 Amazon EKS supports Kubernetes version 1.29, which adds beta support for native sidecar containers via the restartPolicy: Always field on init containers. Sidecar containers inherit IAM permissions from the pod's ServiceAccount, so they work with IRSA and EKS Pod Identity in the same way as regular containers.
2024-02-29 Amazon EKS announces support for Amazon Linux 2023 as an AMI type for managed node groups, Karpenter, and self-managed nodes.
2024-05-23 Amazon EKS supports Kubernetes version 1.30. New managed node groups on Kubernetes 1.30 or higher default to Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023).
2024-06-28 Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group metrics are enabled by default for managed node groups at no additional cost.
2024-07-01 Capacity Blocks for ML are supported on managed node groups, providing reserved GPU capacity.
2024-08-14 EKS Pod Identity becomes available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.
2024-08-14 Karpenter v1.0 is released, graduating its NodePool, NodeClaim, and EC2NodeClass APIs from beta to stable.
2024-09-25 Amazon EKS supports Kubernetes version 1.31.
2024-10-23 Amazon EKS cluster API endpoints support connectivity over Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), complementing the existing pod-level IPv6 support that launched in late 2021.
2024-11-15 Managed node groups can be created in AWS Local Zones.
2024-11-20 Bottlerocket AMIs preconfigured with FIPS 140-3 validated cryptographic modules are available for compliance-sensitive workloads.
2024-12-01 Amazon EKS Auto Mode becomes generally available at AWS re:Invent 2024. Enabled with a single API or console flag on any EKS cluster running Kubernetes 1.29 or higher, EKS Auto Mode fully manages compute, storage, and networking using EC2 managed instances running Bottlerocket, a Karpenter-derived autoscaler, an integrated AWS Load Balancer controller, EBS CSI, NVIDIA device plugin and DCGM Exporter, and the EKS Pod Identity Agent.
2024-12-01 Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes becomes generally available at AWS re:Invent 2024. With EKS Hybrid Nodes, customers attach on-premises bare-metal or virtual-machine hosts as nodes in an EKS cluster while the Kubernetes control plane remains in the AWS Region, connected via AWS Direct Connect, AWS Site-to-Site VPN, or customer-managed VPN. The nodeadm utility joins the nodes to the cluster.
2024-12-20 EKS upgrade insights are expanded to warn about cluster health and version compatibility issues across kubelet, kube-proxy, and Amazon EKS add-ons.
2025-01-14 Amazon EKS is available in the Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region (ap-southeast-7) and Mexico (Central) Region (mx-central-1).
2025-01-24 Amazon EKS supports Kubernetes version 1.32, the last version for which EKS releases Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) AMIs.
2025-01-27 Update strategies for managed node groups are added, introducing the minimal strategy that terminates nodes before launching replacements (useful in capacity-constrained environments).
2025-03-27 Bottlerocket FIPS AMIs become available in standard managed node groups.
2025-03-31 EKS Hybrid Nodes can be added to, changed in, or removed from existing clusters; previously hybrid nodes could only be configured at cluster creation. The eks-node-monitoring-agent add-on is available on hybrid nodes from version 1.2.0-eksbuild.1.
2025-04-29 Bottlerocket becomes available for EKS Hybrid Nodes.
2025-04-30 EKS Auto Mode NodeClass adds advancedNetworking configuration for forward proxy / HTTPS proxy routing of traffic leaving nodes.
2025-05-28 Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro support Kubernetes version 1.33. No Amazon Linux 2 AMI is published for 1.33; EKS continues to release Amazon Linux 2023 and Bottlerocket AMIs.
2025-06-11 EKS Pod Identity adds target IAM roles for automated cross-account role chaining. A Pod Identity association first assumes a role in the same account, then uses that role to assume a target role in another account, with EKS rotating the temporary credentials.
2025-06-13 EKS Auto Mode NodeClass adds podSubnetSelectorTerms and podSecurityGroupSelectorTerms, enabling custom pod subnets and security groups equivalent to VPC CNI custom networking.
2025-06-20 EKS Auto Mode supports launching instances using EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations.
2025-08-27 Cluster insights can be refreshed manually in addition to the automatic 24-hour refresh.
2025-10-01 EKS Auto Mode adds support for deploying nodes to AWS Local Zones, enabling latency-sensitive edge workloads to run on Auto Mode-managed compute.
2025-10-06 Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro support Kubernetes version 1.34.
2025-10-22 EKS Auto Mode becomes available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) Regions, opening it up to public-sector workloads and federal compliance requirements with FIPS-validated cryptographic modules in its AMIs.
2026-02-26 Amazon EKS Auto Mode announces enhanced logging for its managed Kubernetes capabilities, providing operators with deeper visibility into Auto Mode controller behavior.
2026-04-07 Managed node groups support EC2 Auto Scaling warm pools, maintaining pre-initialized EC2 instances ready to join the cluster quickly and reducing latency for applications with long boot times.

Current Overview, Functions, Features of Amazon EKS

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that makes it easier to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install, operate, and maintain your own Kubernetes control plane.

The following diagram summarizes the main deployment options that Amazon EKS supports as of the latest snapshot.
Amazon EKS Deployment Modes - Self-Managed Nodes, Managed Node Groups, AWS Fargate, EKS Hybrid Nodes, EKS Auto Mode, EKS Anywhere, and EKS local cluster on AWS Outposts
Amazon EKS Deployment Modes - Self-Managed Nodes, Managed Node Groups, AWS Fargate, EKS Hybrid Nodes, EKS Auto Mode, EKS Anywhere, and EKS local cluster on AWS Outposts

Managed Kubernetes Control Plane

  • The Kubernetes control plane (API server, scheduler, controller manager, and etcd) runs in an AWS-managed environment distributed across multiple Availability Zones for high availability.
  • AWS monitors and replaces unhealthy control plane nodes and applies security patches and Kubernetes version upgrades to the control plane.
  • Each cluster runs the upstream open-source distribution of Kubernetes and is Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Certified Kubernetes Conformant.

Compute Options

Amazon EKS supports five distinct compute options that share the same control plane and Kubernetes API surface, so that the same kubectl workflow can target any of them.
  • Self-managed nodes
    • The original compute option from the 2018 GA release. You provision Amazon EC2 instances, install the kubelet and the Amazon EKS-optimized AMI yourself, and join them to the cluster.
  • Managed Node Groups (MNG)
    • Generally available since November 18, 2019. Amazon EKS provisions and manages the EC2 instances and the Auto Scaling group, with one-step operations for create, update, and terminate, and automatic node draining during updates and version upgrades.
    • Supports Spot capacity, ARM-based AWS Graviton instances, Bottlerocket AMIs (including FIPS 140-3 variants), Windows AMIs, AWS Local Zones, Capacity Blocks for ML, and EC2 Auto Scaling warm pools.
  • AWS Fargate
    • Generally available since December 3, 2019. Each pod runs on a dedicated micro-VM scheduled by AWS Fargate, with no EC2 instance to manage and strong pod-level isolation. Useful for batch jobs, low-overhead services, and pods that should not share a node with any other workload.
  • EKS Hybrid Nodes
    • Generally available since December 1, 2024 (announced at re:Invent 2024). You attach your own on-premises or edge hardware (bare metal or virtual machines) as nodes in an EKS cluster, while AWS continues to manage the Kubernetes control plane in the AWS Region. Connectivity uses AWS Direct Connect, AWS Site-to-Site VPN, or your own VPN, and the nodeadm utility registers nodes with the cluster.
  • EKS Auto Mode
    • Generally available since December 1, 2024 (announced at re:Invent 2024). With a single API or console flag, EKS takes over provisioning compute, storage, and networking for the cluster: it selects EC2 instance types, scales them using a Karpenter-derived controller, runs Bottlerocket on EC2 managed instances, and ships with built-in AWS Load Balancer Controller, Amazon EBS CSI, NVIDIA device plugin and DCGM Exporter, and the EKS Pod Identity Agent pre-installed.

Identity and Cluster Access

  • aws-auth ConfigMap
    • The original way to map AWS IAM principals to Kubernetes RBAC subjects. Still supported, but increasingly considered legacy.
  • IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA)
    • Available on Amazon EKS clusters using Kubernetes 1.13 or later starting September 3, 2019. Uses an OpenID Connect (OIDC) identity provider hosted by EKS and an IAM trust policy so that each pod can assume a fine-grained IAM role through its Kubernetes ServiceAccount.
  • EKS Access Entries
    • Launched on December 18, 2023. A cluster authentication mode that lets you grant IAM principals access to the cluster directly through EKS APIs, without editing the aws-auth ConfigMap. The new API authentication mode is the recommended default for new clusters.
  • EKS Pod Identity
    • Launched at re:Invent on November 26, 2023. A simpler alternative to IRSA for assigning IAM permissions to pods. It uses an EKS-native trust relationship and the EKS Pod Identity Agent DaemonSet, so cluster administrators do not need OIDC provider permissions. EKS Pod Identity supports IAM role session tags and, since June 11, 2025, cross-account role chaining via target IAM roles. As of 2026, EKS Pod Identity is the recommended default for new clusters, while IRSA continues to be supported and is still required for some scenarios (for example, Fargate pods, since the Pod Identity Agent runs as a DaemonSet).

Amazon EKS Add-ons

  • Amazon EKS add-ons provide curated, AWS-validated installations of operational software on the cluster. Add-ons can be created, updated, and deleted through the EKS API, AWS CloudFormation, eksctl, and the AWS Management Console.
  • Examples of AWS-managed add-ons include the Amazon VPC CNI plugin, kube-proxy, CoreDNS, Amazon EBS CSI driver, Amazon EFS CSI driver, Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver, AWS Load Balancer Controller, the EKS Pod Identity Agent, and the EKS Node Monitoring Agent.
  • AWS Marketplace add-ons and community add-ons are also installable through the same API.

Networking

  • The Amazon VPC CNI plugin gives each pod a routable IP address in your VPC, which simplifies integration with VPC features such as security groups, network ACLs, VPC Flow Logs, and AWS PrivateLink.
  • IPv6 support for pods became generally available in late 2021, with pods receiving globally routable IPv6 addresses from the VPC. Amazon EKS cluster API endpoints themselves became reachable over IPv6 on October 23, 2024.
  • Security groups for pods allow pod-level security group association on both Amazon EC2 nodes and AWS Fargate.
  • Amazon EKS works with the AWS Load Balancer Controller for AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Network Load Balancer (NLB) ingress, including NLB IP-target mode (GA October 23, 2020) so that NLBs can route directly to Fargate pods.

Observability and Operations

  • Control plane logging sends API server, audit, authenticator, controller manager, and scheduler logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
  • Amazon EKS cluster insights (December 20, 2023) provide automatic, recurring checks of your cluster against an AWS-curated list of upgrade and configuration insights. Insights are refreshed every 24 hours, or manually since August 27, 2025.
  • Amazon EKS cluster health detection (December 28, 2023) surfaces infrastructure-level cluster prerequisite issues in the EKS API and console.
  • EKS Node Monitoring Agent, available as an Amazon EKS add-on, detects and reports node health issues; from version 1.2.0-eksbuild.1 on March 31, 2025 it also runs on EKS Hybrid Nodes.

Kubernetes Version Lifecycle

  • Amazon EKS follows the upstream Kubernetes minor release cadence (typically every four months).
  • Standard support for each Kubernetes minor version is 14 months from the date it becomes available on Amazon EKS.
  • Extended support adds 12 additional months for a total of 26 months per minor version. Extended support was first offered as a preview on October 4, 2023, became generally available on January 16, 2024, and applies to Kubernetes 1.21 and higher.
  • At the end of extended support, clusters that have not been upgraded are automatically upgraded to the next supported minor version.

Hybrid, Edge, and Distro Options

  • Amazon EKS Distro (EKS-D) (open-sourced December 1, 2020) is the same Kubernetes distribution that powers Amazon EKS, packaged for you to run yourself anywhere - on premises, in another cloud, or on AWS Snow Family devices.
  • Amazon EKS Anywhere (GA September 8, 2021) is a deployment option for creating and operating Kubernetes clusters on your own infrastructure (initially VMware vSphere, later expanded to bare metal, AWS Snow, Nutanix, and Apache CloudStack), with optional AWS Support.
  • Amazon EKS local clusters on AWS Outposts (GA September 19, 2022) let the entire cluster, including the control plane, run on an Outposts rack for disconnected or low-latency edge use cases.
  • EKS Hybrid Nodes (GA December 1, 2024) keep the control plane in the AWS Region and only the data plane on premises, which is a different operating model from EKS Anywhere.

Frequently Asked Questions (For LLM)

This section is organized so that AI assistants and search engines can locate the canonical answer to common date-based questions about Amazon EKS.

When did Amazon EKS launch?

Amazon EKS was announced as a preview at AWS re:Invent on November 29, 2017 and became generally available on June 5, 2018.

When did Amazon EKS support AWS Fargate?

Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate became generally available on December 3, 2019, announced during the Andy Jassy keynote at AWS re:Invent 2019.

When did Amazon EKS managed node groups launch?

Amazon EKS managed node groups became generally available on November 18, 2019. Launch template support was added in August 2020 and Spot capacity support in December 2020.

When did Amazon EKS support Windows containers?

Amazon EKS announced general availability of Windows nodes on October 8, 2019, supporting Kubernetes 1.14 and later. Windows support for managed node groups was added on December 15, 2022.

When did Amazon EKS support AWS Graviton (ARM)?

Amazon EKS support for ARM-based instances powered by AWS Graviton became generally available on August 17, 2020, supporting Kubernetes 1.15 and later, on both managed and self-managed node groups.

When did Amazon EKS Distro launch?

Amazon EKS Distro (EKS-D) was announced and open-sourced on December 1, 2020 at AWS re:Invent 2020, beginning with Kubernetes v1.18.

When did Amazon EKS Anywhere launch?

Amazon EKS Anywhere became generally available on September 8, 2021, initially on VMware vSphere. Bare-metal and AWS Snow targets followed in 2022, and later Nutanix and Apache CloudStack.

When did Amazon EKS Add-ons launch?

Amazon EKS Add-ons launched in 2020 starting with the Amazon VPC CNI plugin, and expanded over the following years to include kube-proxy, CoreDNS, Amazon EBS CSI driver, Amazon EFS CSI driver, Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver, AWS Load Balancer Controller, the EKS Pod Identity Agent, and others.

When did Amazon EKS support IPv6?

Amazon EKS launched IPv6 support for pods through the Amazon VPC CNI plugin in late 2021, with the corresponding AWS What's New announcement in January 2022. The EKS cluster API endpoints themselves became reachable over IPv6 on October 23, 2024.

When did Amazon EKS Pod Identity launch, and how does it differ from IRSA?

Amazon EKS Pod Identity was announced on November 26, 2023 at AWS re:Invent 2023. Unlike IRSA, which depends on an OIDC identity provider and an IAM trust policy per cluster, EKS Pod Identity uses an EKS-native service principal and the EKS Pod Identity Agent DaemonSet, so the same IAM role can be reused across multiple clusters without modifying its trust policy. EKS Pod Identity also supports IAM role session tags and, since June 11, 2025, cross-account role chaining through target IAM roles. AWS has not announced a specific date on which EKS Pod Identity formally replaced IRSA as the default recommendation, but for clusters where the Pod Identity Agent DaemonSet can run (Amazon EC2 nodes, managed node groups, EKS Auto Mode, EKS Hybrid Nodes), EKS Pod Identity is now the simpler, recommended starting point. IRSA continues to be required for scenarios where the Pod Identity Agent DaemonSet cannot run, most notably for pods scheduled on AWS Fargate.

When did Amazon EKS Access Entries launch?

Amazon EKS Access Entries launched on December 18, 2023. They replace the aws-auth ConfigMap for granting IAM principals access to a cluster, and introduce the API authentication mode that is now the recommended default for new clusters.

When did Amazon EKS Auto Mode launch?

Amazon EKS Auto Mode launched as generally available on December 1, 2024 at AWS re:Invent 2024. It is enabled with a single API or console flag on any EKS cluster running Kubernetes 1.29 or higher, and it offloads cluster compute, storage, and networking to AWS, including OS patching, node lifecycle, and built-in operational add-ons.

When did Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes launch?

Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes launched as generally available on December 1, 2024 at AWS re:Invent 2024. With EKS Hybrid Nodes you keep the control plane in the AWS Region and attach your own on-premises hardware (bare metal or virtual machines) as nodes in an EKS cluster, using AWS Direct Connect, AWS Site-to-Site VPN, or your own VPN, and registering nodes via the nodeadm utility.

When did Amazon EKS extended Kubernetes version support launch?

Amazon EKS extended support for Kubernetes versions was offered as a preview on October 4, 2023 and became generally available on January 16, 2024. It adds 12 months of support on top of the standard 14-month window, for a total of 26 months per Kubernetes minor version, applicable to Kubernetes 1.21 and higher.

Which Kubernetes versions are supported by Amazon EKS, and when did they arrive?

The exact in-EKS GA date varies because Amazon EKS typically picks up a Kubernetes minor version a few months after the upstream release at the first patch version. As a snapshot:
  • 1.10 - initial release, June 5, 2018
  • 1.11 - 2018 (added during 2018, with platform updates through early 2019)
  • 1.12 / 1.13 / 1.14 - added during 2019; 1.14 introduced managed node groups, Windows nodes, and IRSA support
  • 1.15 / 1.16 / 1.17 - added during 2019 - 2020; 1.15 and later support Graviton
  • 1.18 - late 2020; basis for the initial Amazon EKS Distro release
  • 1.21 - 1.24 - added during 2021 - 2022 (IPv6 support for pods via the Amazon VPC CNI plugin became available on EKS clusters running 1.21 or later in late 2021; 1.24 dropped Dockershim in line with upstream)
  • 1.25 - 1.28 - added during 2022 - 2023; all subject to Amazon EKS extended support after standard support ends (extended support applies to 1.21 and higher)
  • 1.29 - January 23, 2024 (minimum version required to enable EKS Auto Mode)
  • 1.30 - May 23, 2024 (new managed node groups default to Amazon Linux 2023)
  • 1.31 - September 25, 2024
  • 1.32 - January 24, 2025 (last Amazon EKS version with Amazon Linux 2 AMIs)
  • 1.33 - May 28, 2025 (no AL2 AMI released; Amazon Linux 2023 and Bottlerocket only)
  • 1.34 - October 6, 2025
For the up-to-date list, refer to "Understand the Kubernetes version lifecycle on EKS".

Summary

The history of Amazon EKS can be read as three overlapping phases.

The first phase (2018 - 2020) was about establishing parity with self-managed Kubernetes: a managed control plane, regional expansion, IRSA for fine-grained pod IAM, Windows nodes, managed node groups, AWS Fargate as a serverless compute option, and Graviton-based ARM nodes. Amazon EKS in this phase was, in effect, a managed Kubernetes API endpoint with progressively easier compute attachments.

The second phase (2020 - 2023) extended Amazon EKS beyond AWS Regions. Amazon EKS Distro made the same Kubernetes binaries available for self-managed use, Amazon EKS Anywhere brought a packaged installer for on-premises infrastructure starting with VMware vSphere, EKS local clusters on AWS Outposts let the entire control plane run on an Outposts rack, IPv6 support relieved the pressure of private IPv4 exhaustion, and Amazon EKS add-ons turned operational software into a first-class lifecycle concern.

The third phase (2023 - present) is about reducing operator toil. EKS Pod Identity and Access Entries simplified the identity story that had grown around IRSA and the aws-auth ConfigMap. Cluster insights and upgrade insights turned Kubernetes version upgrades from a manual checklist into a guided experience. EKS Hybrid Nodes attached on-premises hardware to a cloud-hosted control plane, and EKS Auto Mode pushed the boundary of the AWS shared responsibility model further by also taking over compute, storage, networking, OS patching, node lifecycle, and the most common operational add-ons.

I would like to continue monitoring the trends of what kind of features Amazon EKS will provide in the future.

In addition, there is also a historical timeline of all AWS services including services other than Amazon EKS, so please have a look if you are interested.

AWS History and Timeline - Almost All AWS Services List, Announcements, General Availability(GA)

References:
Amazon EKS - Kubernetes on AWS (Product Page)
What is Amazon EKS? - Amazon EKS User Guide
Document history - Amazon EKS User Guide
Understand the Kubernetes version lifecycle on EKS - Amazon EKS User Guide
Amazon EKS - Now Generally Available - AWS News Blog
Streamline Kubernetes cluster management with new Amazon EKS Auto Mode - AWS News Blog
A deep dive into Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes - AWS Containers Blog
Amazon EKS Pod Identity: a new way for applications on EKS to obtain IAM credentials - AWS Containers Blog
AWS History and Timeline regarding AWS Lambda - Overview, Functions, Features, Summary of Updates, and Introduction
AWS History and Timeline regarding Amazon S3 - Overview, Functions, Features, Summary of Updates, and Introduction
AWS History and Timeline - Almost All AWS Services List, Announcements, General Availability(GA)

Written by Hidekazu Konishi