Kubernetes Upgrades

Who handles Kubernetes upgrades and is there downtime?

AWS EKS manages the Kubernetes control plane — AWS handles its availability and upgrades with no action required from us. Node group upgrades (the EC2 nodes your workloads run on) are performed manually by the Deploy team. The process is:

1. New nodes are launched with the updated version.
2. Existing nodes are cordoned (no new pods scheduled) and drained (running pods are gracefully rescheduled onto the new nodes).
3. Old nodes are terminated only after workloads have been confirmed healthy on the new nodes.

This results in zero downtime for your applications during node upgrades.