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Revision poster: who runs what on EKS.

Infographic: the AWS-managed EKS control plane and the customer VPC with three Availability Zones, connected by network interfaces in your subnets
Click the poster to enlarge it

Left: AWS's side. Right: your VPC and worker nodes. The strip underneath splits the responsibilities.

  1. 1AWS operates the Kubernetes API servers and etcd across several Availability Zones.
  2. 2ENIs in your subnets connect the control plane to your nodes.
  3. 3Nodes may be EC2 (managed groups, Karpenter), Auto Mode or Fargate.
  4. 4IAM authenticates people and workloads; Kubernetes RBAC authorizes them.
  5. 5You run add-ons, workloads, access and data-plane upgrades.

Self-check: cover the poster and answer

  • Which parts of the cluster can you never SSH into?
  • What connects the AWS-managed control plane to your nodes?

AWS runs the control plane; you decide how much of the data plane to own.

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