In this edition we feature upstream release of Kubernetes 1.34 and several exciting enhancements related to Amazon EKS including but not limited to support for Seekable OCI Parallel Pull mode for improving image pull performance, safety control for preventing accidental cluster deletions, expanded support for Cilium with EKS Hybrid Nodes, On-demand Cluster Insights refresh and extended configurability in namespaces for AWS and Community Add-Ons.

New AWS services and features

• Introducing Seekable OCI Parallel Pull mode for Amazon EKS

  • Speed of downloading and unpacking container images is an important factor in workload readiness. Seekable OCI (SOCI) fast pull downloads large layers in chunks allowing this step to complete faster.
  • SOCI’s existing lazy loading technology allows containers to start without downloading entire images,however,for certain workloads such as AI/ML containers, they typically need large libraries and SDKs that are accessed immediately upon startup.
  • SOCI Parallel Pull introduces a new parallel pull mode that addresses this fundamental performance limitation by introducing configurable parallelization across both download and unpacking phases.

• Amazon EKS adds safety control to prevent accidental cluster deletion

  • Amazon EKS now supports up deletion protection, helping you prevent accidental termination of your EKS clusters.
  • With this release, to delete a protected cluster, you must first disable deletion protection for the cluster and then proceed with the cluster deletion. This two-step verification process prevents unintended deletions.

• Announcing expanded support for Cilium with Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes

  • Cilium is a Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) graduated project that provides core networking capabilities for Kubernetes workloads.
  • With this release, Amazon EKS expands support for broader set of Cilium features when using Cilium with Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes including application ingress, in-cluster load balancing, Kubernetes network policies, and kube-proxy replacement mode.

• Amazon EKS introduces on-demand insights refresh

  • Amazon EKS cluster insights provide detection of issues and recommendations to resolve them to help you manage your cluster.
  • Every Amazon EKS cluster undergoes automatic, recurring checks against an Amazon EKS curated list of insights. These insight checks are fully managed by Amazon EKS and offer recommendations on how to address any findings.
  • With the release, Amazon EKS now supports on-demand refresh that can help you fetch latest insights immediately after making changes, accelerating the testing and verification process during cluster upgrades.

• Amazon EKS enables namespace configuration for AWS and Community add-ons

  • With this release, Amazon EKS now supports an option to specify custom namespace during AWS and Community add-on installation.
  • This flexibility helps you align add-ons with your operational needs and existing namespace strategy.

AWS blogs

• [Blog] Implement monitoring for Amazon EKS with managed services

  • Amazon EKS offers compelling solutions with EKS Auto Mode and AWS Fargate, each designed for different use cases.
  • This blog article outlines how you can combine Amazon EKS Auto Mode or Fargate with comprehensive AWS native observability services for comprehensive monitoring.

• [Blog] Building a RAG chat-based assistant on Amazon EKS Auto Mode and NVIDIA NIMs

  • NVIDIA NIM provides prebuilt, optimized inference microservices for rapidly deploying the latest AI models on any NVIDIA-accelerated infrastructure.
  • The NVIDIA NIM Operator is a Kubernetes management tool that facilitates the operation of model-serving components and services. It handles large language models (LLMs), embedders, and other model types through NVIDIA NIM microservices within Kubernetes environments.
  • This blog article serves as a guidance to deploy a RAG-enabled chat-based assistant on Amazon EKS, using NVIDIA NIM microservices, integrating an LLM for text generation, an embedding model, and Amazon OpenSearch Serverless for vector storage.

• [Blog] Migrate to Amazon EKS: Data plane cost modeling with Karpenter and KWOK

  • Karpenter is an open source Kubernetes node autoscaler that efficiently provisions just-in-time compute resources to match workload demands, by using concept of Providers to interact with different infrastructure platforms for provisioning and managing compute resources.
  • KWOK (Kubernetes WithOut Kubelet) is a toolkit that simulates data plane nodes without allocating actual infrastructure, and can be used as a provider to create lightweight testing environments.
  • This blog article serves as walkthrough guide for leveraging KWOK NodeClass as reference for Karpenter Nodepool to mimic a Kubernetes migration to Amazon EKS and estimate cost efficiently.

• [Blog] GitOps continuous delivery with ArgoCD and EKS using natural language

  • ArgoCD is a leading GitOps tool that empowers teams to manage Kubernetes deployments declaratively, using Git as the single source of truth.
  • This blog article serves as walkthrough guide for integrating ArgoCD MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server with Amazon Q CLI to transform the user experience with natural language interaction for GitOps operations.

• [Blog] Canary delivery with Argo Rollout and Amazon VPC Lattice for Amazon EKS

  • Progressive delivery strategies, such as canary deployments, allow organizations to release new features by shifting traffic incrementally between old and new versions of a service.
  • This blog article serves as walkthrough guide on how Amazon VPC Lattice, Argo Rollouts, and Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to build a production-grade progressive delivery system that is safe, observable, and scalable.

• [Blog] Backup Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) resources using NetApp Trident Protect

  • NetApp Trident Protect is a free tool from NetApp that provides Kubernetes cluster data protection, data migration, disaster recovery, and movement of containerized workloads across AWS Regions and on-premises environments.
  • This blog article serves as walkthrough guide on steps neccesary for backing up Amazon EKS resources using NetApp Trident Protect

Community news and articles

• Kubernetes v1.34: Of Wind & Will (O’ WaW)

  • Kubernetes 1.34 introduces 58 enhancements, including 23 stable features, 22 beta features, and 13 alpha features, with major improvements in Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA), authentication configuration, and Linux swap support.
  • The release, themed “Of Wind & Will (O’ WaW)”, brings significant updates to container lifecycle management, Pod-level resource handling, and API server performance optimizations.

• Kubernetes Deployment Strategies Explained

  • The article will dive deep into the intricacies of Kubernetes deployments, exploring a range of strategies - from the foundational Recreate and Rolling Update approaches to the more advanced Blue-Green and Canary techniques.

• Avoiding AWS Control Plane Overload During EKS Upgrades: The 20% Roll Rate Strategy

  • This article explores one of the ways to avoid API server overloading during Cluster Upgrades.

Videos and webinars

• Secure your Kubernetes Containers on Amazon EKS Auto Mode | ft. Chainguard

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025 Playlist

Open source projects

• Flyte
  • Flyte is an open-source orchestrator that facilitates building production-grade data and ML pipelines.