Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

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Amazon EKS add-ons

An add-on is software that provides supporting operational capabilities to Kubernetes applications, but is not specific to the application. This includes software like observability agents or Kubernetes drivers that allow the cluster to interact with underlying Amazon resources for networking, compute, and storage. Add-on software is typically built and maintained by the Kubernetes community, cloud providers like Amazon, or third-party vendors. Amazon EKS automatically installs self-managed add-ons such as the Amazon VPC CNI plugin for Kubernetes, kube-proxy, and CoreDNS for every cluster. Note that the VPC CNI add-on isn’t compatible with Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes and doesn’t deploy to hybrid nodes. You can change the default configuration of the add-ons and update them when desired.

Amazon EKS add-ons provide installation and management of a curated set of add-ons for Amazon EKS clusters. All Amazon EKS add-ons include the latest security patches, bug fixes, and are validated by Amazon to work with Amazon EKS. Amazon EKS add-ons allow you to consistently ensure that your Amazon EKS clusters are secure and stable and reduce the amount of work that you need to do in order to install, configure, and update add-ons. If a self-managed add-on, such as kube-proxy is already running on your cluster and is available as an Amazon EKS add-on, then you can install the kube-proxy Amazon EKS add-on to start benefiting from the capabilities of Amazon EKS add-ons.

You can update specific Amazon EKS managed configuration fields for Amazon EKS add-ons through the Amazon EKS API. You can also modify configuration fields not managed by Amazon EKS directly within the Kubernetes cluster once the add-on starts. This includes defining specific configuration fields for an add-on where applicable. These changes are not overridden by Amazon EKS once they are made. This is made possible using the Kubernetes server-side apply feature. For more information, see Determine fields you can customize for Amazon EKS add-ons.

You can use Amazon EKS add-ons with any Amazon EKS node type. For more information, see Manage compute resources by using nodes.

You can add, update, or delete Amazon EKS add-ons using the Amazon EKS API, Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon CLI, and eksctl. You can also create Amazon EKS add-ons using Amazon CloudFormation.

Considerations

Consider the following when you use Amazon EKS add-ons:

Required platform version

Review the table to determine the minimum required platform version to use this feature with your cluster. You can use the listed platform version, or a more recent platform version. For example, if the table lists "eks.14" you can use platform version "eks.15". For more information, see View Amazon EKS platform versions for each Kubernetes version.

Considerations for Amazon EKS Auto Mode

Amazon EKS Auto mode includes capabilities that deliver essential cluster functionality, including:

With Auto mode compute, many commonly used EKS add-ons become redundant, such as:

However, if your cluster combines Auto mode with other compute options like self-managed EC2 instances, Managed Node Groups, or Amazon Fargate, these add-ons remain necessary. Amazon has enhanced EKS add-ons with anti-affinity rules that automatically ensure add-on pods are scheduled only on supported compute types. Furthermore, users can now leverage the EKS add-ons DescribeAddonVersions API to verify the supported computeTypes for each add-on and its specific versions. Additionally, with EKS Auto mode, the controllers listed above run on Amazon owned infrastructure. So, you many not even see them in your accounts unless you are using EKS auto mode with other types of compute in which case, you will see the controllers you installed on your cluster.

If you are planning to enable EKS Auto Mode on an existing cluster, you may need to upgrade the version of certain addons. For more information, see Required Add-on Versions for EKS Auto Mode.

Support

Amazon publishes multiple types of add-ons with different levels of support.

The following table details the scope of support for each add-on type:

Amazon Marketplace add-ons can download additional software dependencies from external sources outside of Amazon. These external dependencies are not scanned or validated by Amazon. Consider your security requirements when deploying Amazon Marketplace add-ons that fetch external dependencies.