Amazon EKS Capabilities: Quick Summary

Source: Dev.to

Overview

A quick summary typed by my own thumbs and an infographic generated by Nano Banana Pro.

EKS Auto Mode (2023)

Last year, AWS introduced EKS Auto Mode, which offloaded node management and scaling. Customers no longer needed to handle scaling nodes, upgrading nodes, etc., giving them more time to deploy and manage their applications.

Managed ArgoCD, ACK, and KRO (2024)

This year, EKS added the ability to manage ArgoCD, AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK), and KRO as separate, fully‑managed services. AWS runs, scales, upgrades, and monitors these components on your behalf.

Pros

• One less component for you to manage.
• Since ArgoCD, ACK, and KRO run outside your worker nodes, you don’t incur compute costs for them.
• AWS handles scaling, upgrades, and health monitoring.

Cons

• The feature is billed as part of EKS Capabilities pricing.
• Not all features may be supported.
• Customization options are limited.

Pricing Considerations

• The cost is primarily driven by the number of ArgoCD applications you manage.
• Other capabilities and managed services are relatively cheaper.
• Evaluate whether the extra expense aligns with your team’s expertise, the number of clusters you operate, and the volume of applications per ArgoCD instance.

Further Reading

My colleague Jatin Mehrotra wrote an excellent blog about EKS capabilities and identified a bug. (Link to the blog can be added here.)