Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Auto Mode, a new capability to streamline Kubernetes cluster management for compute, storage, and networking, from provisioning to on-going maintenance with a single click. You can achieve higher agility, performance, and cost-efficiency by eliminating the operational overhead of managing the cluster infrastructure required to run production-grade Kubernetes applications at scale on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Customers choose Amazon EKS because they can use the open standards and portability of Kubernetes with the security, scalability, and availability of AWS cloud. While Kubernetes gives advanced customers deep controls over application operations, other customers find managing the components required for production-grade Kubernetes applications to be complex and labor-intensive.

With the EKS Auto Mode, you can automate cluster management without deep Kubernetes expertise, because it selects optimal compute instances, dynamically scales resources, continuously optimizes costs, manages core add-ons, patches operating systems, and integrates with AWS security services. AWS expands its operational responsibility in EKS Auto Mode compared to customer-managed infrastructure in your EKS clusters. In addition to the EKS control plane, AWS will configure, manage, and secure the AWS infrastructure in EKS clusters that your applications need to run.

You can now get started quickly, improve performance, and reduce overhead, enabling you to focus on building applications that drive innovation instead of on cluster management tasks. EKS Auto Mode also reduces the work required to acquire and run cost-efficient GPU-accelerated instances so that your generative AI workloads have the capacity they need when they need it.

Get started with Amazon EKS Auto Mode
To get started, go to the Amazon EKS console and start to create your EKS cluster. You’ll have two options, Quick configuration (with EKS Auto Mode) and Custom configuration.

After you choose quick configuration, enter your cluster name and Kubernetes version, IAM roles, VPC subnets. You can view configuration default values in EKS Auto Mode whether you can edit after the cluster is created.

EKS Auto Mode enables the following Kubernetes capabilities in your EKS cluster:

• Compute auto scaling and management
• Application load balancing management
• Pod and service networking and network policies
• Cluster DNS and GPU support
• Block storage volume support

When you choose Create, your EKS cluster with Auto Mode will be deployed in minutes with a single click.

If you choose the custom configuration option, you can customize other aspects of your cluster. You can use EKS Auto Mode in this option too.

You can also create an EKS Auto Mode cluster using AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), eksctl, and AWS CloudFormation. Run the following eksctl command to create a new EKS Auto Mode cluster with:

$ eksctl create cluster --name=<cluster-name> --enable-auto-mode

To learn more, visit Create cluster with EKS Auto Mode in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

If you want to enable EKS Auto Mode for an existing EKS cluster, choose Manage in the EKS Auto Mode section of the Overview tab in the EKS cluster detail page.

Select the box next to Use EKS Auto Mode to enable the EKS Auto Mode. You can unselect the EKS Auto Mode that will be configured in the cluster. The default is to create both a system and a default node pool and a node class.

You can also migrate from Karpenter, EKS Managed Node Groups, and EKS Fargate to EKS Auto Mode. To learn more, visit Enable EKS Auto Mode on existing EKS clusters in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

To meet your workload requirements, you can configure specific aspects of your EKS Auto Mode clusters. While EKS Auto Mode manages most infrastructure components automatically, you can customize node networking settings, node compute resources, storage class settings, and application load balancing behaviors while maintaining the benefits of automated infrastructure management. To learn more, visit Change EKS Auto cluster settings in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

Now, you can deploy different types of workloads to Amazon EKS clusters running in EKS Auto Mode. We provide key workload patterns including sample applications, load-balanced web applications, stateful workloads using persistent storage, and workloads with specific node placement requirements. Each example includes complete manifests and step-by-step deployment instructions that you can use as templates for your own applications. To learn more, visit Run workloads in EKS Auto Mode clusters in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

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