Amazon EKS: Kubernetes 1.34 end of standard support

Once Kubernetes 1.34 is past the end of standard support date, it enters extended support for the next 12 months, at an additional cost per cluster hour.

• Extended support is enabled by default.
• Billing starts at the beginning of the day that the version reaches end of standard support, in the UTC+0 timezone.
• A cluster whose upgrade policy has extended support disabled is automatically upgraded to the next Kubernetes version at the end of standard support.
• Extended support cannot be disabled once a cluster has entered it.
• A cluster not updated before the extended support period ends is automatically updated by Amazon EKS to the earliest supported version.

1. Use Amazon EKS upgrade insights to identify issues before the upgrade.
2. Before updating the control plane, make sure the Kubernetes minor version of the managed nodes and Fargate nodes is the same as the control plane version. Then upgrade the control plane to a version in the standard support period, one minor version at a time, following Update existing cluster to new Kubernetes version.
3. After the cluster update is complete, update the nodes to the same Kubernetes minor version as the cluster. Then update the Amazon VPC CNI plugin for Kubernetes, CoreDNS, and kube-proxy add-ons.
4. To stay on Kubernetes 1.34, keep the cluster upgrade policy set to EXTENDED. An additional cost applies to clusters running in extended support, see the pricing page.
5. To avoid extended support, set the upgrade policy to standard support while the cluster is still on standard support, as described in Disable EKS extended support. The cluster is then auto upgraded at the end of standard support.