Posted On: Jun 27, 2024

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provides the flexibility to create Kubernetes clusters without the default networking add-ons, enabling you to easily install open source or third party alternative add-ons or self-manage default networking add-ons using any Kubernetes lifecycle management tool. Cluster creation flexibility for networking add-ons is available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD.

Every EKS cluster automatically comes with default networking add-ons including Amazon VPC CNI, CoreDNS, and kube-proxy providing critical functionality that enables pod and service operations for EKS clusters. EKS also allows you to bring open source or third party add-ons and tools that manage their lifecycle. With today’s launch, you can skip the installation of default networking add-ons when creating the cluster, making it easier to install alternative add-ons. This also simplifies self-managing default networking add-ons using any lifecycle management tool like Helm or Kustomize, without needing to first remove the Kubernetes manifests of the add-ons from the cluster. 

You can opt out of default networking add-ons during cluster creation from the EKS console, CLI, API, and IaC tools like Amazon CloudFormation. To learn more, see the EKS documentation.