Kubernetes ships a minor version about every four months and EKS supports each for 14 months, then 12 more at six times the price. A repeatable upgrade: insights first, control plane, add-ons, nodes, then Fargate pods, with a seven-day rollback window for in-place upgrades and the checks between each step.
The cheapest EKS upgrade is the one you do every four months, one minor version at a time. The expensive one is three versions at once in the week before an automatic upgrade, under extended support pricing.
Book a free 30-minute call. You'll leave knowing what we'd do first and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire us.
Read the version's changes in the EKS user guide, and check upgrade insights for deprecated APIs your manifests and Helm charts still use.
Upgrade staging first, and let it run a few days with real traffic patterns.
Upgrade the control plane (one minor version per step). In-place upgrades can be rolled back to the previous minor version within seven days.
Upgrade the managed add-ons: VPC CNI, CoreDNS, kube-proxy, EBS CSI, Pod Identity Agent.
Upgrade nodes: managed node groups by version update, Karpenter by drift and new AMIs, Auto Mode on its own.
Restart Fargate pods (rolling restart of their Deployments) so they come back with the new kubelet.
Upgrade your own controllers: ingress, Argo CD, cert-manager, autoscalers, operators. Their compatibility matrices are usually what blocks a version.
PodDisruptionBudgets on every service that matters, so node replacement drains one replica at a time.
Readiness probes that mean "ready", so traffic waits for new pods.
Dashboards for error rate and latency open during the change; a written rollback trigger.
Nodes never more than one minor version behind the control plane for longer than the upgrade itself.
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Book a free 30-minute call about it. Bring your setup and your bill; you'll leave knowing what we'd do first and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire us.
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As of November 2, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.