Available Amazon EKS add-ons from AWS

The following Amazon EKS add-ons are available to create on your cluster. You can view the most current list of available add-ons using eksctl, the AWS Management Console, or the AWS CLI. To see all available add-ons or to install an add-on, see Creating an Amazon EKS add-on. If an add-on requires IAM permissions, then you must have an IAM OpenID Connect (OIDC) provider for your cluster. To determine whether you have one, or to create one, see Create an IAM OIDC provider for your cluster. You can update or delete an add-on after you've installed it.

You can use any of the following Amazon EKS add-ons.

Description	Learn more
Provide native VPC networking for your cluster	Amazon VPC CNI plugin for Kubernetes
A flexible, extensible DNS server that can serve as the Kubernetes cluster DNS	CoreDNS
Maintain network rules on each Amazon EC2 node	Kube-proxy
Provide Amazon EBS storage for your cluster	Amazon EBS CSI driver
Provide Amazon EFS storage for your cluster	Amazon EFS CSI driver
Provide Amazon S3 storage for your cluster	Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI Driver
Enable the use of snapshot functionality in compatible CSI drivers, such as the Amazon EBS CSI driver	CSI snapshot controller
Secure, production-ready, AWS supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry project	AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry
Security monitoring service that analyzes and processes foundational data sources including AWS CloudTrail management events and Amazon VPC flow logs. Amazon GuardDuty also processes features, such as Kubernetes audit logs and runtime monitoring	Amazon GuardDuty agent
Monitoring and observability service provided by AWS. This add-on installs the CloudWatch Agent and enables both CloudWatch Application Signals and CloudWatch Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon EKS	Amazon CloudWatch Observability agent
Ability to manage credentials for your applications, similar to the way that EC2 instance profiles provide credentials to EC2 instances	EKS Pod Identity Agent

Amazon VPC CNI plugin for Kubernetes

The Amazon VPC CNI plugin for Kubernetes Amazon EKS add-on is a Kubernetes container network interface (CNI) plugin that provides native VPC networking for your cluster. The self-managed or managed type of this add-on is installed on each Amazon EC2 node, by default. For more information, see Kubernetes container network interface (CNI) plugin.

The Amazon EKS add-on name is vpc-cni.

Required IAM permissions

This add-on uses the IAM roles for service accounts capability of Amazon EKS. If your cluster uses the IPv4 family, the permissions in the AmazonEKS_CNI_Policy are required. If your cluster uses the IPv6 family, you must create an IAM policy with the permissions in IPv6 mode. You can create an IAM role, attach one of the policies to it, and annotate the Kubernetes service account used by the add-on with the following command.

Replace my-cluster with the name of your cluster and AmazonEKSVPCCNIRole with the name for your role. If your cluster uses the IPv6 family, then replace AmazonEKS_CNI_Policy with the name of the policy that you created. This command requires that you have eksctl installed on your device. If you need to use a different tool to create the role, attach the policy to it, and annotate the Kubernetes service account, see Assign IAM roles to Kubernetes service accounts.

eksctl create iamserviceaccount --name aws-node --namespace kube-system --cluster my-cluster --role-name AmazonEKSVPCCNIRole \
    --role-only --attach-policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonEKS_CNI_Policy --approve

Update information

You can only update one minor version at a time. For example, if your current version is 1.29.x-eksbuild.y and you want to update to 1.31.x-eksbuild.y, then you must update your current version to 1.30.x-eksbuild.y and then update it again to 1.31.x-eksbuild.y. For more information about updating the add-on, see Updating the Amazon VPC CNI plugin for Kubernetes Amazon EKS add-on.

CoreDNS

The CoreDNS Amazon EKS add-on is a flexible, extensible DNS server that can serve as the Kubernetes cluster DNS. The self-managed or managed type of this add-on was installed, by default, when you created your cluster. When you launch an Amazon EKS cluster with at least one node, two replicas of the CoreDNS image are deployed by default, regardless of the number of nodes deployed in your cluster. The CoreDNS Pods provide name resolution for all Pods in the cluster. You can deploy the CoreDNS Pods to Fargate nodes if your cluster includes an Define which Pods use AWS Fargate when launched with a namespace that matches the namespace for the CoreDNS deployment.

The Amazon EKS add-on name is coredns.

Required IAM permissions

This add-on doesn't require any permissions.

Additional information

To learn more about CoreDNS, see Using CoreDNS for Service Discovery and Customizing DNS Service in the Kubernetes documentation.

Kube-proxy

The Kube-proxy Amazon EKS add-on maintains network rules on each Amazon EC2 node. It enables network communication to your Pods. The self-managed or managed type of this add-on is installed on each Amazon EC2 node in your cluster, by default.

The Amazon EKS add-on name is kube-proxy.

Required IAM permissions

This add-on doesn't require any permissions.

Update information

Before updating your current version, consider the following requirements:

• Kube-proxy on an Amazon EKS cluster has the same compatibility and skew policy as Kubernetes.

Additional information

To learn more about kube-proxy, see kube-proxy in the Kubernetes documentation.

Amazon EBS CSI driver

The Amazon EBS CSI driver Amazon EKS add-on is a Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin that provides Amazon EBS storage for your cluster.

The Amazon EKS add-on name is aws-ebs-csi-driver.

Required IAM permissions

This add-on utilizes the IAM roles for service accounts capability of Amazon EKS. The permissions in the AmazonEBSCSIDriverPolicy AWS managed policy are required. You can create an IAM role and attach the managed policy to it with the following command. Replace my-cluster with the name of your cluster and AmazonEKS_EBS_CSI_DriverRole with the name for your role. This command requires that you have eksctl installed on your device. If you need to use a different tool or you need to use a custom KMS key for encryption, see Step 1: Create an IAM role.

eksctl create iamserviceaccount \
    --name ebs-csi-controller-sa \
    --namespace kube-system \
    --cluster my-cluster \
    --role-name AmazonEKS_EBS_CSI_DriverRole \
    --role-only \
    --attach-policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AmazonEBSCSIDriverPolicy \
    --approve

Additional information

To learn more about the add-on, see Store Kubernetes volumes with Amazon EBS.

Amazon EFS CSI driver

The Amazon EFS CSI driver Amazon EKS add-on is a Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin that provides Amazon EFS storage for your cluster.

The Amazon EKS add-on name is aws-efs-csi-driver.

Required IAM permissions

Required IAM permissions – This add-on utilizes the IAM roles for service accounts capability of Amazon EKS. The permissions in the AmazonEFSCSIDriverPolicy AWS managed policy are required. You can create an IAM role and attach the managed policy to it with the following commands. Replace my-cluster with the name of your cluster and AmazonEKS_EFS_CSI_DriverRole with the name for your role. These commands require that you have eksctl installed on your device. If you need to use a different tool, see Step 1: Create an IAM role.

export cluster_name=my-cluster
export role_name=AmazonEKS_EFS_CSI_DriverRole
eksctl create iamserviceaccount \
    --name efs-csi-controller-sa \
    --namespace kube-system \
    --cluster $cluster_name \
    --role-name $role_name \
    --role-only \
    --attach-policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AmazonEFSCSIDriverPolicy \
    --approve
TRUST_POLICY=$(aws iam get-role --role-name $role_name --query 'Role.AssumeRolePolicyDocument' | \
    sed -e 's/efs-csi-controller-sa/efs-csi-*/' -e 's/StringEquals/StringLike/')
aws iam update-assume-role-policy --role-name $role_name --policy-document "$TRUST_POLICY"

Additional information

To learn more about the add-on, see Store an elastic file system with Amazon EFS.

Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI Driver

The Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI Driver Amazon EKS add-on is a Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin that provides Amazon S3 storage for your cluster.

The Amazon EKS add-on name is aws-mountpoint-s3-csi-driver.

Required IAM permissions

This add-on uses the IAM roles for service accounts capability of Amazon EKS. The IAM role that is created will require a policy that gives access to S3. Follow the Mountpoint IAM permissions recommendations when creating the policy. Alternatively, you may use the AWS managed policy AmazonS3FullAccess, but this managed policy grants more permissions than are needed for Mountpoint.

You can create an IAM role and attach your policy to it with the following commands. Replace my-cluster with the name of your cluster, region-code with the correct AWS Region code, AmazonEKS_S3_CSI_DriverRole with the name for your role, and AmazonEKS_S3_CSI_DriverRole_ARN with the role ARN. These commands require that you have eksctl installed on your device. For instructions on using the IAM console or AWS CLI, see Create an IAM role.

CLUSTER_NAME=my-cluster
REGION=region-code
ROLE_NAME=AmazonEKS_S3_CSI_DriverRole
POLICY_ARN=AmazonEKS_S3_CSI_DriverRole_ARN
eksctl create iamserviceaccount \
    --name s3-csi-driver-sa \
    --namespace kube-system \
    --cluster $CLUSTER_NAME \
    --attach-policy-arn $POLICY_ARN \
    --approve \
    --role-name $ROLE_NAME \
    --region $REGION \
    --role-only

Additional information

To learn more about the add-on, see Access Amazon S3 objects with Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver.

CSI snapshot controller

The Container Storage Interface (CSI) snapshot controller enables the use of snapshot functionality in compatible CSI drivers, such as the Amazon EBS CSI driver.

The Amazon EKS add-on name is snapshot-controller.

Required IAM permissions

This add-on doesn't require any permissions.

Additional information

To learn more about the add-on, see Enable snapshot functionality for CSI volumes.

AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry

The AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry Amazon EKS add-on is a secure, production-ready, AWS supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry project. For more information, see AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry on GitHub.

The Amazon EKS add-on name is adot.

Required IAM permissions

This add-on only requires IAM permissions if you're using one of the preconfigured custom resources that can be opted into through advanced configuration.

Additional information

For more information, see Getting Started with AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry using EKS Add-Ons in the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry documentation.

ADOT requires that cert-manager is deployed on the cluster as a prerequisite, otherwise this add-on won't work if deployed directly using the Amazon EKS Terraform cluster_addons property. For more requirements, see Requirements for Getting Started with AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry using EKS Add-Ons in the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry documentation.

Amazon GuardDuty agent

The Amazon GuardDuty agent Amazon EKS add-on is a security monitoring service that analyzes and processes foundational data sources including AWS CloudTrail management events and Amazon VPC flow logs. Amazon GuardDuty also processes features, such as Kubernetes audit logs and runtime monitoring.

The Amazon EKS add-on name is aws-guardduty-agent.

Required IAM permissions

This add-on doesn't require any permissions.

Additional information

For more information, see Runtime Monitoring for Amazon EKS clusters in Amazon GuardDuty.

• To detect potential security threats in your Amazon EKS clusters, enable Amazon GuardDuty runtime monitoring and deploy the GuardDuty security agent to your Amazon EKS clusters.

Amazon CloudWatch Observability agent

The Amazon CloudWatch Observability agent Amazon EKS add-on the monitoring and observability service provided by AWS. This add-on installs the CloudWatch Agent and enables both CloudWatch Application Signals and CloudWatch Container Insights with enhanced observability for Amazon EKS. For more information, see Amazon CloudWatch Agent.

The Amazon EKS add-on name is amazon-cloudwatch-observability.

Required IAM permissions

This add-on uses the IAM roles for service accounts capability of Amazon EKS. The permissions in the AWSXrayWriteOnlyAccess and CloudWatchAgentServerPolicy AWS managed policies are required. You can create an IAM role, attach the managed policies to it, and annotate the Kubernetes service account used by the add-on with the following command. Replace my-cluster with the name of your cluster and AmazonEKS_Observability_role with the name for your role. This command requires that you have eksctl installed on your device. If you need to use a different tool to create the role, attach the policy to it, and annotate the Kubernetes service account, see Assign IAM roles to Kubernetes service accounts.

eksctl create iamserviceaccount \
    --name cloudwatch-agent \
    --namespace amazon-cloudwatch \
    --cluster my-cluster \
    --role-name AmazonEKS_Observability_Role \
    --role-only \
    --attach-policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AWSXrayWriteOnlyAccess \
    --attach-policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/CloudWatchAgentServerPolicy \
    --approve

Additional information

For more information, see Install the CloudWatch agent.

EKS Pod Identity Agent

The Amazon EKS Pod Identity Agent Amazon EKS add-on provides the ability to manage credentials for your applications, similar to the way that EC2 instance profiles provide credentials to EC2 instances.

The Amazon EKS add-on name is eks-pod-identity-agent.

Required IAM permissions

This add-on users permissions from the Amazon EKS node IAM role.

Update information

You can only update one minor version at a time. For example, if your current version is 1.29.x-eksbuild.y and you want to update to 1.31.x-eksbuild.y, then you must update your current version to 1.30.x-eksbuild.y and then update it again to 1.31.x-eksbuild.y. For more information about updating the add-on, see Updating the Amazon VPC CNI plugin for Kubernetes Amazon EKS add-on.