What is Amazon EKS? - Amazon EKS
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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).

What is Amazon EKS?

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that eliminates the need to install, operate, and maintain your own Kubernetes control plane on Amazon Web Services (Amazon). Kubernetes is an open-source system that automates the management, scaling, and deployment of containerized applications.

Features of Amazon EKS

The following are key features of Amazon EKS:

Secure networking and authentication

Amazon EKS integrates your Kubernetes workloads with Amazon networking and security services. It also integrates with Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) to provide authentication for your Kubernetes clusters.

Easy cluster scaling

Amazon EKS enables you to scale your Kubernetes clusters up and down easily based on the demand of your workloads. Amazon EKS supports horizontal Pod autoscaling based on CPU or custom metrics, and cluster autoscaling based on the demand of the entire workload.

Managed Kubernetes experience

You can make changes to your Kubernetes clusters using eksctl, Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon Command Line Interface (Amazon CLI), the API, kubectl, and Terraform.

High availability

Amazon EKS provides high availability for your control plane across multiple Availability Zones.

Integration with Amazon services

Amazon EKS integrates with other Amazon services, providing a comprehensive platform for deploying and managing your containerized applications. You can also more easily troubleshoot your Kubernetes workloads with various observability tools.

For details about other features of Amazon EKS, see Amazon EKS features.

Get started with Amazon EKS

To create your first cluster and its associated resources, see Getting started with Amazon EKS. In general, getting started with Amazon EKS involves the following steps.

  1. Create a cluster – Start by creating your cluster using eksctl, Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon CLI, or one of the Amazon SDKs.

  2. Choose your approach to compute resources – Decide between Amazon Fargate, Karpenter, managed node groups, and self-managed nodes.

  3. Setup – Set up the necessary controllers, drivers, and services.

  4. Deploy workloads – Tailor your Kubernetes workloads to best utilize the resources and capabilities of your chosen node type.

  5. Management – Oversee your workloads, integrating Amazon services to streamline operations and enhance workload performance. You can view information about your workloads using the Amazon Web Services Management Console.

The following diagram shows a basic flow of running Amazon EKS in the cloud. To learn about other Kubernetes deployment options, see Deployment options.

A basic flow diagram of the steps described previously.

Pricing for Amazon EKS

An Amazon EKS cluster consists of a control plane and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or Fargate compute that you run Pods on. For more information about pricing for the control plane, see Amazon EKS pricing. Both Amazon EC2 and Fargate provide:

On-Demand Instances

Pay for the instances that you use by the second, with no long-term commitments or upfront payments.