🚀 Upgrading Your Amazon EKS Cluster – Best Practices & Lessons Learned! 🚀

Just completed an Amazon EKS cluster upgrade, and here are some key Points that might help you.

🔹 Why Upgrade? Keeping your Kubernetes version up to date is crucial for security patches, new features, and improved stability. AWS supports only the latest three minor versions, so staying up with current version prevents unexpected issues.

🔹 Pre-Upgrade Checklist:

✅ Check EKS Version Compatibility – Ensure worker nodes, add-ons and control-node support the new version.

✅ Backup Everything – Take snapshots of etcd, databases, and application configs.

✅ Review Release Notes - Understand the changes and its effects.

✅ Verify Component Compatibility – Ensure all cluster components are compatible with the target Kubernetes version before upgrading.

✅ Test in a Lower Environment – Never upgrade production first!

🔹 The Upgrade Process:

1️⃣ Upgrade Managed Control Plane - Start by upgrading the EKS control plane to the latest supported version, ensuring compatibility with workloads, APIs, and add-ons before proceeding to the data plane.

2️⃣ Upgrade Worker Nodes or Data Plane - Once the control plane is upgraded, update worker nodes (managed or self-managed) while ensuring they remain within one minor version of the control plane to maintain cluster stability.

3️⃣ Upgrade Add-ons and Plugins - upgrade EKS add-ons such as CoreDNS, VPC CNI, and kube-proxy to match the new Kubernetes version, preventing compatibility issues and ensuring optimal cluster performance.

Upgrading Kubernetes can be tricky, but with the right planning, it’s a smooth and risk-free process.