Amazon EKS Kubernetes versions

The Kubernetes project is rapidly evolving with new features, design updates, and bug fixes. The community releases new Kubernetes minor versions, such as 1.16, as generally available approximately every three months, and each minor version is supported for approximately nine months after it is first released.

Available Amazon EKS Kubernetes versions

The following Kubernetes versions are currently available for new clusters in Amazon EKS:

• 1.16.8

• 1.15.11

• 1.14.9

Important

Kubernetes version 1.13 is now deprecated on Amazon EKS. As of June 30th, 2020, Kubernetes version 1.13 is no longer supported on Amazon EKS. You are no longer able to create new 1.13 clusters, and all existing Amazon EKS clusters running Kubernetes version 1.13 will eventually be automatically updated to version 1.14. We recommend that you update any 1.13 clusters to version 1.14 or later in order to avoid service interruption. For more information, see Amazon EKS version deprecation.

Kubernetes API versions available through Amazon EKS are officially supported by AWS, until we remove the ability to create clusters using that version. This is true even if upstream Kubernetes is no longer supporting a version available on Amazon EKS. We backport security fixes that are applicable to the Kubernetes versions supported on Amazon EKS. Existing clusters are always supported, and Amazon EKS will automatically update your cluster to a supported version if you have not done so manually by the version end of life date.

Unless your application requires a specific version of Kubernetes, we recommend that you choose the latest available Kubernetes version supported by Amazon EKS for your clusters. As new Kubernetes versions become available in Amazon EKS, we recommend that you proactively update your clusters to use the latest available version. For more information, see Updating an Amazon EKS cluster Kubernetes version.

Kubernetes 1.16

Kubernetes 1.16 is now available in Amazon EKS. For more information about Kubernetes 1.16, see the official release announcement.

Important

• Kubernetes 1.16 removes a number of deprecated APIs. Changes to your applications may be required before upgrading your cluster to 1.16. Carefully follow the 1.16 upgrade prerequisites before upgrading.

• Starting with 1.16, the Amazon EKS certificate authority will honor certificate signing requests with SAN X.509 extensions, which resolves the EKS CA should honor SAN x509 extension feature request from GitHub.

The following Kubernetes features are now supported in Kubernetes 1.16 Amazon EKS clusters:

• Volume expansion in the CSI specification has moved to beta, which allows for any CSI spec volume plugin to be resizeable. For more information, see Volume Expansion in the Kubernetes CSI documentation. The latest version of the EBS CSI driver supports volume expansion when running on an Amazon EKS 1.16 cluster.

• Windows GMSA support has graduated from alpha to beta, and is now supported by Amazon EKS. For more information, see Configure GMSA for Windows Pods and containers in the Kubernetes documentation.

• A new annotation: service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-eip-allocations is available on service type LoadBalancer to assign an elastic IP address to Network Load Balancers. For more information, see the Support EIP Allocations with AWS NLB GitHub issue.

• Finalizer protection for service load balancers is now in beta and enabled by default. Service load balancer finalizer protection ensures that any load balancer resources allocated for a Kubernetes Service object, such as the AWS Network Load Balancer, will be destroyed or released when the service is deleted. For more information, see Garbage Collecting Load Balancers in the Kubernetes documentation.

• The Kubernetes custom resource definitions and admission webhooks extensibility mechanisms have both reached general availability. For more information, see Custom Resources and Dynamic Admission Control in the Kubernetes documentation.

• The server-side apply feature has reached beta status and is enabled by default. For more information, see Server Side Apply in the Kubernetes documentation.

• The CustomResourceDefaulting feature is promoted to beta and enabled by default. Defaults may be specified in structural schemas through the apiextensions.k8s.io/v1 API. For more information, see Specifying a structural schema in the Kubernetes documentation.

For the complete Kubernetes 1.16 changelog, see https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/CHANGELOG/CHANGELOG-1.16.md.

Kubernetes 1.15

Kubernetes 1.15 is now available in Amazon EKS. For more information about Kubernetes 1.15, see the official release announcement.

Important

Starting with 1.15, Amazon EKS no longer tags the VPC containing your cluster.

• Subnets within the VPC of your cluster are still tagged.

• VPC tags will not be modified on existing cluster upgrades to 1.15.

• For more information about VPC tagging, see VPC tagging requirement.

Important

Amazon EKS has set the re-invocation policy for the Pod Identity Webhook to IfNeeded. This allows the webhook to be re-invoked if objects are changed by other mutating admission webhooks like the App Mesh sidecar injector. For more information about the App Mesh sidecar injector, see Install the sidecar injector.

The following features are now supported in Kubernetes 1.15 Amazon EKS clusters:

• EKS now supports configuring transport layer security (TLS) termination, access logs, and source ranges for network load balancers. For more information, see Network Load Balancer support on AWS on GitHub.

• Improved flexibility of Custom Resource Definitions (CRD), including the ability to convert between versions on the fly. For more information, see Extend the Kubernetes API with CustomResourceDefinitions on GitHub.

• NodeLocal DNSCache is in beta for Kubernetes version 1.15 clusters. This feature can help improve cluster DNS performance by running a DNS caching agent on cluster nodes as a DaemonSet. For more information, see Using NodeLocal DNSCache in Kubernetes clusters on GitHub.

For the complete Kubernetes 1.15 changelog, see https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/CHANGELOG/CHANGELOG-1.15.md.

Kubernetes 1.14

Kubernetes 1.14 is now available in Amazon EKS. For more information about Kubernetes 1.14, see the official release announcement.

Important

The --allow-privileged flag has been removed from kubelet on Amazon EKS 1.14 worker nodes. If you have modified or restricted the Amazon EKS default pod security policy on your cluster, you should verify that your applications have the permissions they need on 1.14 worker nodes.

The following features are now supported in Kubernetes 1.14 Amazon EKS clusters:

• Container Storage Interface Topology is in beta for Kubernetes version 1.14 clusters. For more information, see CSI Topology Feature in the Kubernetes CSI Developer Documentation. The following CSI drivers provide a CSI interface for container orchestrators like Kubernetes to manage the life cycle of Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon EFS file systems, and Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems:

  • Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) CSI driver

  • Amazon EFS CSI driver

  • Amazon FSx for Lustre CSI driver

• Process ID (PID) limiting is in beta for Kubernetes version 1.14 clusters. This feature allows you to set quotas for how many processes a pods can create, which can prevent resource starvation for other applications on a cluster. For more information, see Process ID limiting for stability improvements in Kubernetes 1.14.

• Persistent Local Volumes are now GA and make locally attached storage available as a persistent volume source. For more information, see Kubernetes 1.14: Local persistent volumes GA.

• Pod Priority and Preemption is now GA and allows pods to be assigned a scheduling priority level. For more information, see Pod Priority and Preemption in the Kubernetes documentation.

• Windows worker node support is GA with Kubernetes 1.14.

For the complete Kubernetes 1.14 changelog, see https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/CHANGELOG/CHANGELOG-1.14.md.

Amazon EKS version deprecation

In line with the Kubernetes community support for Kubernetes versions, Amazon EKS is committed to running at least three production-ready versions of Kubernetes at any given time, with a fourth version in deprecation.

We will announce the deprecation of a given Kubernetes minor version at least 60 days before the end of support date. Because of the Amazon EKS qualification and release process for new Kubernetes versions, the deprecation of a Kubernetes version on Amazon EKS will be on or after the date the Kubernetes project stops supporting the version upstream.

On the end of support date, Amazon EKS clusters running the deprecated version will begin to be automatically updated to the next Amazon EKS-supported version of Kubernetes. For example, if the deprecated version is 1.13, clusters will eventually be automatically updated to version 1.14. If a cluster is automatically updated by Amazon EKS, you must update the version of your worker nodes after the update is complete. For more information, see Self-managed worker node updates.

Kubernetes supports compatibility between the control plane and worker nodes for up to two minor versions, so 1.14 workers will continue to operate when orchestrated by a 1.16 control plane. For more information, see Kubernetes version and version skew support policy in the Kubernetes documentation.