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 1.18, as generally available approximately every three months, and each minor version is supported for approximately twelve months after it is first released.

Available Amazon EKS Kubernetes versions

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

• 1.18.9

• 1.17.12

• 1.16.15

• 1.15.12

• 1.14.9

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. For more information, see Amazon EKS Kubernetes release calendar and Amazon EKS version support and FAQ.

Kubernetes 1.18

Kubernetes 1.18 is now available in Amazon EKS. For more information about Kubernetes 1.18, see the official release announcement.

The following Kubernetes features are now supported in Kubernetes 1.18 Amazon EKS clusters:

• Topology Manager has reached beta status. This feature allows the CPU and Device Manager to coordinate resource allocation decisions, optimizing for low latency with machine learning and analytics workloads. For more information, see Control Topology Management Policies on a node in the Kubernetes documentation.

• Server-side Apply is updated with a new beta version. This feature tracks and manages changes to fields of all new Kubernetes objects, allowing you to know what changed your resources and when. For more information, see What is Server-side Apply? in the Kubernetes documentation.

• A new pathType field and a new IngressClass resource has been added to the Ingress specification. These features make it simpler to customize Ingress configuration, and are supported by the AWS load balancer controller (formerly called the ALB Ingress Controller). For more information, see Improvements to the Ingress API in Kubernetes 1.18 in the Kubernetes documentation.

  Note

  IngressClass is not yet supported in the ALB ingress controller.

• Configurable horizontal pod autoscaling behavior. For more information, see Support for configurable scaling behavior in the Kubernetes documentation.

• Pod Topology Spread has reached beta status. You can use topology spread constraints to control how pods are spread across your cluster among failure-domains such as Regions, zones, nodes, and other user-defined topology domains. This can help to achieve high availability as well as efficient resource utilization. For more information, see Pod Topology Spread Constraints in the Kubernetes documentation.

• In 1.18 clusters, you no longer need to include the AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=<region-code> environment variable to pods when using IAM roles for service accounts in China regions, whether you use the mutating web hook or configure the environment variables manually. You still need to include the variable for all pods in earlier versions.

For the complete Kubernetes 1.18 changelog, see https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/CHANGELOG/CHANGELOG-1.18.md.

Kubernetes 1.17

Kubernetes 1.17 is now available in Amazon EKS. For more information about Kubernetes 1.17, see the official release announcement.

Important

• EKS has not enabled the CSIMigrationAWS feature flag. This will be enabled in a future release, along with detailed migration instructions. For more info on CSI migration, see the Kubernetes blog.

• Upgrading a cluster from 1.16 to 1.17 will fail if any of your AWS Fargate pods have a kubelet minor version earlier than 1.16. Before upgrading your cluster from 1.16 to 1.17, you need to recycle your Fargate pods so that their kubelet is 1.16 before attempting to upgrade the cluster to 1.17. To recycle a Kubernetes deployment on a 1.15 or later cluster, use the following command.

  kubectl rollout restart deployment <deployment-name>

The following Kubernetes features are now supported in Kubernetes 1.17 Amazon EKS clusters:

• Cloud Provider Labels have reached general availability. If you are using the beta labels in your pod specs for features such as node affinity, or in any custom controllers, then we recommend that you start migrating them to the new GA labels. For information about the new labels, see the following Kubernetes documentation:

  • node.kubernetes.io/instance-type

  • topology.kubernetes.io/region

  • topology.kubernetes.io/zone

• The ResourceQuotaScopeSelectors feature has graduated to generally available. This feature allows you to limit the number of resources a quota supports to only those that pertain to the scope.

• The TaintNodesByCondition feature has graduated to generally available. This feature allows you to taint nodes that have conditions such as high disk or memory pressure.

• The CSI Topology feature has graduated to generally available, and is fully supported by the EBS CSI driver. You can use topology to restrict the Availability Zone where a volume is provisioned.

• Finalizer protection for services of type LoadBalancer has graduated to generally available. This feature ensures that a service resource is not fully deleted until the correlating load balancer is also deleted.

• Custom resources now support default values. You specify values in an OpenAPI v3 validation schema.

• The Windows containers RunAsUsername feature is now in beta, allowing you to run Windows applications in a container as a different username than the default.

For the complete Kubernetes 1.17 changelog, see https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/CHANGELOG/CHANGELOG-1.17.md.

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.

  Note

  When running CoreDNS on Amazon EC2, we recommend not using force_tcp in the configuration and ensuring that options use-vc is not set in /etc/resolv.conf.

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 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 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 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 Kubernetes release calendar

Note

Dates with only a month and a year are approximate and are updated with an exact date when it is known.

Kubernetes version	Upstream release	Amazon EKS release	Amazon EKS end of support
1.14	March 25, 2019	September 4, 2019	December 8, 2020
1.15	June 19, 2019	March 10, 2020	May, 2021
1.16	Septermber 8, 2019	April 30, 2020	July, 2021
1.17	December 9, 2019	July 10, 2020	September, 2021
1.18	March 23, 2020	October 13, 2020	November, 2021
1.19	August 26, 2020	January, 2021	February, 2022

Amazon EKS version support and FAQ

In line with the Kubernetes community support for Kubernetes versions, Amazon EKS is committed to supporting at least four production-ready versions of Kubernetes at any given time. We will announce the end of support date 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 end of support date of a Kubernetes version on Amazon EKS will be on or after the date that the Kubernetes project stops supporting the version upstream.

Kubernetes supports compatibility between the control plane and nodes for up to two minor versions. For example, 1.16 nodes will continue to operate when orchestrated by a 1.18 control plane. For more information, see Kubernetes version and version skew support policy in the Kubernetes documentation.

Frequently asked questions

Q: How long is a Kubernetes version supported by Amazon EKS?

A: A Kubernetes version is fully supported for 14 months after first being available on Amazon EKS. This is true even if upstream Kubernetes is no longer supporting a version available on Amazon EKS. We backport security patches that are applicable to the Kubernetes versions supported on Amazon EKS.

Q: When does support end for a Kubernetes version on Amazon EKS?

A: Approximately 12 months after a version is released on Amazon EKS (usually with the release of a new version) Amazon EKS will send out a notice through the AWS Personal Health Dashboard if any clusters in your account are running the version nearing end of support. The notice will include the end of support date, which will be at least 60 days from the date of the notice.

Q: What happens on the end of support date?

A: On the end of support date, you will no longer be able to create new Amazon EKS clusters with the unsupported version. Existing clusters will be automatically upgraded to the oldest supported version through a gradual deployment process after the end of support date.

Q: When exactly will my cluster be automatically upgraded after the end of support date?

A: Amazon EKS is unable to provide specific timeframes. Automatic upgrades can happen at any time after the end of support date. We recommend that you take proactive action and upgrade your clusters without relying on the Amazon EKS automatic upgrade process.

Q: Can I leave my cluster on a Kubernetes version indefinitely?

A: No. In the interest of security, Amazon EKS does not allow clusters to stay on a version that has reached end of support.