EKS Control Plane and Worker Nodes
Understand what AWS manages in the EKS control plane, provision managed node groups, and connect kubectl to your cluster.
What Is Amazon EKS?
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service that removes the burden of installing, operating, and maintaining the Kubernetes control plane. AWS runs, scales, and upgrades the control plane across multiple Availability Zones, providing a highly available cluster endpoint. You focus entirely on deploying and managing your application workloads.
The EKS Control Plane
The EKS control plane consists of the API server, etcd, controller manager, and scheduler — all managed by AWS. These components run in AWS-owned accounts, meaning you never SSH into them. AWS guarantees a 99.95% SLA for the EKS API endpoint and automatically replaces unhealthy control plane nodes. You pay a flat per-cluster-per-hour fee for the control plane.
All lessons in this course
- EKS Control Plane and Worker Nodes
- Fargate Profiles for Serverless Pods
- EKS Networking: VPC CNI and Load Balancing
- IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA)