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Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is the premiere platform for running Kubernetes
Amazon EKS simplifies building, securing, and maintaining Kubernetes clusters. It can be more cost effective at providing enough resources to meet peak demand than maintaining your own data centers. Two of the main approaches to using Amazon EKS are as follows:
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EKS standard: AWS manages the Kubernetes control plane
when you create a cluster with EKS. Components that manage nodes, schedule workloads, integrate with the AWS cloud, and store and scale control plane information to keep your clusters up and running, are handled for you automatically. -
EKS Auto Mode: Using the EKS Auto Mode feature, EKS extends its control to manage Nodes
(Kubernetes data plane) as well. It simplifies Kubernetes management by automatically provisioning infrastructure, selecting optimal compute instances, dynamically scaling resources, continuously optimizing costs, patching operating systems, and integrating with AWS security services.
The following diagram illustrates how Amazon EKS integrates your Kubernetes clusters with the AWS cloud, depending on which method of cluster creation you choose:
Amazon EKS helps you accelerate time to production, improve performance, availability and resiliency, and enhance system security.
For more information, see Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
Features of Amazon EKS
Amazon EKS provides the following high-level features:
- Management interfaces
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EKS offers multiple interfaces to provision, manage, and maintain clusters, including AWS Management Console, Amazon EKS API/SDKs, CDK, AWS CLI, eksctl CLI, AWS CloudFormation, and Terraform. For more information, see Get started with Amazon EKS and Organize workloads with Amazon EKS clusters.
- Access control tools
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EKS relies on both Kubernetes and AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) features to manage access from users and workloads. For more information, see Grant IAM users and roles access to Kubernetes APIs and Grant Kubernetes workloads access to AWS using Kubernetes Service Accounts.
- Compute resources
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For compute resources, EKS allows the full range of Amazon EC2 instance types and AWS innovations such as Nitro and Graviton with Amazon EKS for you to optimize the compute for your workloads. For more information, see Manage compute resources by using nodes.
- Storage
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EKS Auto Mode automatically creates storage classes using EBS volumes. Using Container Storage Interface (CSI) drivers, you can also use Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, Amazon FSX, and Amazon File Cache for your application storage needs. For more information, see Store application data for your cluster.
- Security
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The shared responsibility model is employed as it relates to Security in Amazon EKS. For more information, see Security best practices, Infrastructure security, and Kubernetes security.
- Monitoring tools
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Use the observability dashboard to monitor Amazon EKS clusters. Monitoring tools include Prometheus, CloudWatch, Cloudtrail, and ADOT Operator. For more information on dashboards, metrics servers, and other tools, see EKS cluster costs and Kubernetes Metrics Server.
- Kubernetes compatibility and support
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Amazon EKS is certified Kubernetes-conformant, so you can deploy Kubernetes-compatible applications without refactoring and use Kubernetes community tooling and plugins. EKS offers both standard support and extended support for Kubernetes. For more information, see Understand the Kubernetes version lifecycle on EKS.
Related services
Services to use with Amazon EKS
You can use other AWS services with the clusters that you deploy using Amazon EKS:
- Amazon EC2
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Obtain on-demand, scalable compute capacity with Amazon EC2.
- Amazon EBS
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Attach scalable, high-performance block storage resources with Amazon EBS.
- Amazon ECR
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Store container images securely with Amazon ECR.
- Amazon CloudWatch
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Monitor AWS resources and applications in real time with Amazon CloudWatch.
- Amazon Prometheus
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Track metrics for containerized applications with Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus.
- Elastic Load Balancing
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Distribute incoming traffic across multiple targets with Elastic Load Balancing.
- Amazon GuardDuty
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Detect threats to EKS clusters with Amazon GuardDuty.
- AWS Resilience Hub
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Assess EKS cluster resiliency with AWS Resilience Hub.
Amazon EKS Pricing
Amazon EKS has per cluster pricing based on Kubernetes cluster version support, pricing for Amazon EKS Auto Mode, and per vCPU pricing for Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes.
When using Amazon EKS, you pay separately for the AWS resources you use to run your applications on Kubernetes worker nodes. For example, if you are running Kubernetes worker nodes as Amazon EC2 instances with Amazon EBS volumes and public IPv4 addresses, you are charged for the instance capacity through Amazon EC2, the volume capacity through Amazon EBS, and the IPv4 address through Amazon VPC.
Visit the respective pricing pages of the AWS services you are using with your Kubernetes applications for detailed pricing information.
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For Amazon EKS cluster, Amazon EKS Auto Mode, and Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes pricing, see Amazon EKS Pricing
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For Amazon EC2 pricing, see Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing
and Amazon EC2 Spot Pricing . -
For AWS Fargate pricing, see AWS Fargate Pricing
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You can use your savings plans for compute used in Amazon EKS clusters. For more information, see Pricing with Savings Plans
.
