View Amazon EKS networking requirements for VPC and subnets - Amazon EKS
VPC requirements and considerationsSubnet requirements and considerationsShared subnet requirements and considerations

View Amazon EKS networking requirements for VPC and subnets

When you create a cluster, you specify a VPC and at least two subnets that are in different Availability Zones. This topic provides an overview of Amazon EKS specific requirements and considerations for the VPC and subnets that you use with your cluster. If you don’t have a VPC to use with Amazon EKS, see Create an Amazon VPC for your Amazon EKS cluster. If you’re creating a local or extended cluster on AWS Outposts, see Create a VPC and subnets for Amazon EKS clusters on AWS Outposts instead of this topic. The content in this topic applies for Amazon EKS clusters with hybrid nodes. For additional networking requirements for hybrid nodes, see Prepare networking for hybrid nodes.

VPC requirements and considerations

When you create a cluster, the VPC that you specify must meet the following requirements and considerations:

  • The VPC must have a sufficient number of IP addresses available for the cluster, any nodes, and other Kubernetes resources that you want to create. If the VPC that you want to use doesn’t have a sufficient number of IP addresses, try to increase the number of available IP addresses.

    You can do this by updating the cluster configuration to change which subnets and security groups the cluster uses. You can update from the AWS Management Console, the latest version of the AWS CLI, AWS CloudFormation, and eksctl version v0.164.0-rc.0 or later. You might need to do this to provide subnets with more available IP addresses to successfully upgrade a cluster version.

    Important

    All subnets that you add must be in the same set of AZs as originally provided when you created the cluster. New subnets must satisfy all of the other requirements, for example they must have sufficient IP addresses.

    For example, assume that you made a cluster and specified four subnets. In the order that you specified them, the first subnet is in the us-west-2a Availability Zone, the second and third subnets are in us-west-2b Availability Zone, and the fourth subnet is in us-west-2c Availability Zone. If you want to change the subnets, you must provide at least one subnet in each of the three Availability Zones, and the subnets must be in the same VPC as the original subnets.

    If you need more IP addresses than the CIDR blocks in the VPC have, you can add additional CIDR blocks by associating additional Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) blocks with your VPC. You can associate private (RFC 1918) and public (non-RFC 1918) CIDR blocks to your VPC either before or after you create your cluster. It can take a cluster up to five hours for a CIDR block that you associated with a VPC to be recognized.

    You can conserve IP address utilization by using a transit gateway with a shared services VPC. For more information, see Isolated VPCs with shared services and Amazon EKS VPC routable IP address conservation patterns in a hybrid network.

  • If you want Kubernetes to assign IPv6 addresses to Pods and services, associate an IPv6 CIDR block with your VPC. For more information, see Associate an IPv6 CIDR block with your VPC in the Amazon VPC User Guide. You cannot use IPv6 addresses with Pods and services running on hybrid nodes and you cannot use hybrid nodes with clusters configured with the IPv6 IP address family.

  • The VPC must have DNS hostname and DNS resolution support. Otherwise, nodes can’t register to your cluster. For more information, see DNS attributes for your VPC in the Amazon VPC User Guide.

  • The VPC might require VPC endpoints using AWS PrivateLink. For more information, see Subnet requirements and considerations.

If you created a cluster with Kubernetes 1.14 or earlier, Amazon EKS added the following tag to your VPC:

Key Value

kubernetes.io/cluster/my-cluster

owned

This tag was only used by Amazon EKS. You can remove the tag without impacting your services. It’s not used with clusters that are version 1.15 or later.

Subnet requirements and considerations

When you create a cluster, Amazon EKS creates 2–4 elastic network interfaces in the subnets that you specify. These network interfaces enable communication between your cluster and your VPC. These network interfaces also enable Kubernetes features such as kubectl exec and kubectl logs. Each Amazon EKS created network interface has the text Amazon EKS cluster-name in its description.

Amazon EKS can create its network interfaces in any subnet that you specify when you create a cluster. You can change which subnets Amazon EKS creates its network interfaces in after your cluster is created. When you update the Kubernetes version of a cluster, Amazon EKS deletes the original network interfaces that it created, and creates new network interfaces. These network interfaces might be created in the same subnets as the original network interfaces or in different subnets than the original network interfaces. To control which subnets network interfaces are created in, you can limit the number of subnets you specify to only two when you create a cluster or update the subnets after creating the cluster.

Subnet requirements for clusters

The subnets that you specify when you create or update a cluster must meet the following requirements:

  • The subnets must each have at least six IP addresses for use by Amazon EKS. However, we recommend at least 16 IP addresses.

  • The subnets must be in at least two different Availability Zones.

  • The subnets can’t reside in AWS Outposts or AWS Wavelength. However, if you have them in your VPC, you can deploy self-managed nodes and Kubernetes resources to these types of subnets. For more information about self-managed nodes, see Maintain nodes yourself with self-managed nodes.

  • The subnets can be a public or private. However, we recommend that you specify private subnets, if possible. A public subnet is a subnet with a route table that includes a route to an internet gateway, whereas a private subnet is a subnet with a route table that doesn’t include a route to an internet gateway.

  • The subnets can’t reside in the following Availability Zones:

    AWS Region Region name Disallowed Availability Zone IDs

    us-east-1

    US East (N. Virginia)

    use1-az3

    us-west-1

    US West (N. California)

    usw1-az2

    ca-central-1

    Canada (Central)

    cac1-az3

IP address family usage by component

The following table contains the IP address family used by each component of Amazon EKS. You can use a network address translation (NAT) or other compatibility system to connect to these components from source IP addresses in families with the "No" value for a table entry.

Functionality can differ depending on the IP family (ipFamily) setting of the cluster. This setting changes the type of IP addresses used for the CIDR block that Kubernetes assigns to Services. A cluster with the setting value of IPv4 is referred to as an IPv4 cluster, and a cluster with the setting value of IPv6 is referred to as an IPv6 cluster.

Component IPv4 addresses IPv6 addresses Dual stack addresses

EKS API public endpoint

Yes1,3

Yes1,3

Yes1,3

EKS API VPC endpoint

Yes

No

No

EKS Auth API public endpoint (EKS Pod Identity)

Yes1

Yes1

Yes1

EKS Auth API VPC endpoint (EKS Pod Identity)

Yes1

Yes1

Yes1

IPv4 Kubernetes cluster public endpoint2

Yes

No

No

IPv4 Kubernetes cluster private endpoint2

Yes

No

No

IPv6 Kubernetes cluster public endpoint2

Yes1,4

Yes1,4

Yes4

IPv6 Kubernetes cluster private endpoint2

Yes1,4

Yes1,4

Yes4

Kubernetes cluster subnets

Yes2

No

Yes2

Node Primary IP addresses

Yes2

No

Yes2

Cluster CIDR range for Service IP addresses

Yes2

Yes2

No

Pod IP addresses from the VPC CNI

Yes2

Yes2

No

IRSA OIDC Issuer URLs

Yes1,3

Yes1,3

Yes1,3

Note

1 The endpoint is dual stack with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Your applications outside of AWS, your nodes for the cluster, and your pods inside the cluster can reach this endpoint by either IPv4 or IPv6.

2 You choose between an IPv4 cluster and IPv6 cluster in the IP family (ipFamily) setting of the cluster when you create a cluster and this can’t be changed. Instead, you must choose a different setting when you create another cluster and migrate your workloads.

3 The dual-stack endpoint was introduced in August 2024. To use the dual-stack endpoints with the AWS CLI, see the Dual-stack and FIPS endpoints configuration in the AWS SDKs and Tools Reference Guide. The following lists the new endpoints:

EKS API public endpoint

eks.region.api.aws

IRSA OIDC Issuer URLs

oidc-eks.region.api.aws

4 The dual-stack cluster endpoint was introduced in October 2024. EKS creates the following endpoint for new clusters that are made after this date and that select IPv6 in the IP family (ipFamily) setting of the cluster:

EKS cluster public/private endpoint

eks-cluster.region.api.aws

Subnet requirements for nodes

You can deploy nodes and Kubernetes resources to the same subnets that you specify when you create your cluster. However, this isn’t necessary. This is because you can also deploy nodes and Kubernetes resources to subnets that you didn’t specify when you created the cluster. If you deploy nodes to different subnets, Amazon EKS doesn’t create cluster network interfaces in those subnets. Any subnet that you deploy nodes and Kubernetes resources to must meet the following requirements:

  • The subnets must have enough available IP addresses to deploy all of your nodes and Kubernetes resources to.

  • If you want Kubernetes to assign IPv6 addresses to Pods and services, then you must have one IPv6 CIDR block and one IPv4 CIDR block that are associated with your subnet. For more information, see Associate an IPv6 CIDR block with your subnet in the Amazon VPC User Guide. The route tables that are associated with the subnets must include routes to IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. For more information, see Routes in the Amazon VPC User Guide. Pods are assigned only an IPv6 address. However the network interfaces that Amazon EKS creates for your cluster and your nodes are assigned an IPv4 and an IPv6 address.

  • If you need inbound access from the internet to your Pods, make sure to have at least one public subnet with enough available IP addresses to deploy load balancers and ingresses to. You can deploy load balancers to public subnets. Load balancers can load balance to Pods in private or public subnets. We recommend deploying your nodes to private subnets, if possible.

  • If you plan to deploy nodes to a public subnet, the subnet must auto-assign IPv4 public addresses or IPv6 addresses. If you deploy nodes to a private subnet that has an associated IPv6 CIDR block, the private subnet must also auto-assign IPv6 addresses. If you used the AWS CloudFormation template provided by Amazon EKS to deploy your VPC after March 26, 2020, this setting is enabled. If you used the templates to deploy your VPC before this date or you use your own VPC, you must enable this setting manually. For the template, see Create an Amazon VPC for your Amazon EKS cluster. For more information, see Modify the public IPv4 addressing attribute for your subnet and Modify the IPv6 addressing attribute for your subnet in the Amazon VPC User Guide.

  • If the subnet that you deploy a node to is a private subnet and its route table doesn’t include a route to a network address translation (NAT) device (IPv4) or an egress-only gateway (IPv6), add VPC endpoints using AWS PrivateLink to your VPC. VPC endpoints are needed for all the AWS services that your nodes and Pods need to communicate with. Examples include Amazon ECR, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Security Token Service, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The endpoint must include the subnet that the nodes are in. Not all AWS services support VPC endpoints. For more information, see What is AWS PrivateLink? and AWS services that integrate with AWS PrivateLink. For a list of more Amazon EKS requirements, see Deploy private clusters with limited internet access.

  • If you want to deploy load balancers to a subnet, the subnet must have the following tag:

    • Private subnets

      Key Value

      kubernetes.io/role/internal-elb

      1

    • Public subnets

      Key Value

      kubernetes.io/role/elb

      1

When a Kubernetes cluster that’s version 1.18 and earlier was created, Amazon EKS added the following tag to all of the subnets that were specified.

Key Value

kubernetes.io/cluster/my-cluster

shared

When you create a new Kubernetes cluster now, Amazon EKS doesn’t add the tag to your subnets. If the tag was on subnets that were used by a cluster that was previously a version earlier than 1.19, the tag wasn’t automatically removed from the subnets when the cluster was updated to a newer version. Version 2.1.1 or earlier of the AWS Load Balancer Controller requires this tag. If you are using a newer version of the Load Balancer Controller, you can remove the tag without interrupting your services. For more information about the controller, see Route internet traffic with AWS Load Balancer Controller.

If you deployed a VPC by using eksctl or any of the Amazon EKS AWS CloudFormation VPC templates, the following applies:

  • On or after March 26, 2020 – Public IPv4 addresses are automatically assigned by public subnets to new nodes that are deployed to public subnets.

  • Before March 26, 2020 – Public IPv4 addresses aren’t automatically assigned by public subnets to new nodes that are deployed to public subnets.

This change impacts new node groups that are deployed to public subnets in the following ways:

Shared subnet requirements and considerations

You can use VPC sharing to share subnets with other AWS accounts within the same AWS Organizations. You can create Amazon EKS clusters in shared subnets, with the following considerations:

  • The owner of the VPC subnet must share a subnet with a participant account before that account can create an Amazon EKS cluster in it.

  • You can’t launch resources using the default security group for the VPC because it belongs to the owner. Additionally, participants can’t launch resources using security groups that are owned by other participants or the owner.

  • In a shared subnet, the participant and the owner separately controls the security groups within each respective account. The subnet owner can see security groups that are created by the participants but cannot perform any actions on them. If the subnet owner wants to remove or modify these security groups, the participant that created the security group must take the action.

  • If a cluster is created by a participant, the following considerations apply:

  • The shared VPC owner cannot view, update or delete a cluster that a participant creates in the shared subnet. This is in addition to the VPC resources that each account has different access to. For more information, see Responsibilities and permissions for owners and participants in the Amazon VPC User Guide.

  • If you use the custom networking feature of the Amazon VPC CNI plugin for Kubernetes, you need to use the Availability Zone ID mappings listed in the owner account to create each ENIConfig. For more information, see Deploy pods in alternate subnets with custom networking.

For more information about VPC subnet sharing, see Share your VPC with other accounts in the Amazon VPC User Guide.