Amazon EKS managed node groups now support EC2 launch templates and custom AMIs
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports using launch templates to customize EC2 instance settings for nodes managed by EKS. When combined, managed node groups with launch templates make it simple to add and update nodes in your cluster, while adhering to any level of specialized security or compliance requirements.
EKS managed node groups automates the provisioning and lifecycle management of Kubernetes worker nodes, eliminating the need to select or configure multiple AWS services to add and update nodes in a cluster. Launch templates provide a declarative method for modifying EC2 settings such as volume encryption, security groups, tags, and user data for executing commands on instance launch. Until now, you could only provide a limited set of instance level customization options through the managed node groups API. With the launch template integration, you can customize a wide range of EC2 instance settings to meet compliance and application requirements, while offloading the operational tasks of node provisioning, draining, and upgrading to EKS. For customers with sophisticated requirements that can’t be met with user data commands, or the need to run nodes with operating systems other than Amazon Linux 2, managed nodes also supports launch templates that specify custom AMIs.
To get started, see the documentation for more details. See the AWS Region Table for the list of regions where Amazon EKS is currently available. To learn more about how to get started with Amazon EKS, visit the product page.