ActivateCertificateAuthority

Activates a successor certificate authority (CA) as the signing certificate authority for your cluster, completing a CA rotation.

When you activate a successor CA, Amazon EKS promotes it to be the cluster's signer (its signingStatus becomes IN_USE) and the outgoing CA is retired (NOT_USED). The outgoing CA remains in the cluster's trust bundle but no longer signs certificates. The successor CA you activate must already be present on the cluster and fully distributed (its distributionStatus must be COMPLETE). This is an asynchronous operation that returns an update object you can track with DescribeUpdate.

Before you activate the successor CA, make sure the worker nodes you manage and your external clients have been updated to trust it, so they maintain connectivity to the API server after activation. For a limited period after activation, CA rollback is available to revert to the outgoing CA if needed. If you don't activate the successor CA yourself, Amazon EKS activates it automatically as the expiration deadline approaches. For more information, see Rotate the Amazon EKS cluster certificate authority in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

Request Syntax

POST /clusters/name/certificate-authorities/certificateAuthorityId/activate HTTP/1.1
Content-type: application/json

{
   "clientRequestToken": "string"
}

URI Request Parameters

The request uses the following URI parameters.

Request Body

The request accepts the following data in JSON format.

Response Syntax

HTTP/1.1 200
Content-type: application/json

{
   "certificateAuthority": { 
      "activatedAt": number,
      "activatedBy": "string",
      "createdAt": number,
      "createdBy": "string",
      "distributionStatus": "string",
      "id": "string",
      "signingStatus": "string"
   },
   "update": { 
      "cancellation": { 
         "reason": "string",
         "status": "string"
      },
      "createdAt": number,
      "errors": [ 
         { 
            "errorCode": "string",
            "errorMessage": "string",
            "resourceIds": [ "string" ]
         }
      ],
      "id": "string",
      "params": [ 
         { 
            "type": "string",
            "value": "string"
         }
      ],
      "status": "string",
      "type": "string"
   }
}

Response Elements

If the action is successful, the service sends back an HTTP 200 response.

The following data is returned in JSON format by the service.

Errors

For information about the errors that are common to all actions, see Common Errors.

Examples

In the following example or examples, the Authorization header contents (AUTHPARAMS) must be replaced with an AWS Signature Version 4 signature. For more information about creating these signatures, see Signature Version 4 Signing Process in the Amazon EKS General Reference.

You need to learn how to sign HTTP requests only if you intend to manually create them. When you use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) or one of the AWS SDKs to make requests to AWS, these tools automatically sign the requests for you with the access key that you specify when you configure the tools. When you use these tools, you don't need to learn how to sign requests yourself.

Example

The following example activates the certificate authority with the ID b2c3d4e5-6789-0abc-def0-1234567890ab as the signing certificate authority for the cluster named my-cluster.

Sample Request

POST /clusters/my-cluster/certificate-authorities/b2c3d4e5-6789-0abc-def0-1234567890ab/activate HTTP/1.1
Host: eks.us-west-2.amazonaws.com
Accept-Encoding: identity
User-Agent: aws-cli/2.9.0 Python/3.9.11 Windows/10 exe/AMD64 prompt/off command/eks.activate-certificate-authority
X-Amz-Date: 20260729T193227Z
Authorization: AUTHPARAMS
Content-Length: 62

{
	"clientRequestToken": "5a8578bd-b6c1-4624-9e65-d0b70f857835"
}

Sample Response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2026 19:32:43 GMT
Content-Type: application/json
x-amzn-RequestId: xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxx
X-Amzn-Trace-Id: Root=1-xxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Connection: keep-alive

{
	"certificateAuthority": {
		"id": "b2c3d4e5-6789-0abc-def0-1234567890ab",
		"createdAt": 1785312515.848,
		"createdBy": "CUSTOMER",
		"signingStatus": "ACTIVATING",
		"distributionStatus": "COMPLETE"
	},
	"update": {
		"id": "2b3c4d5e-6789-90ab-cdef-EXAMPLE22222",
		"status": "InProgress",
		"type": "CertificateAuthorityUpdate",
		"params": [
			{
				"type": "ActiveCertificateAuthority",
				"value": "b2c3d4e5-6789-0abc-def0-1234567890ab"
			}
		],
		"createdAt": 1785312515.848,
		"errors": []
	}
}

See Also

For more information about using this API in one of the language-specific AWS SDKs, see the following: