Posted On: Jul 27, 2021
The Amazon VPC Container Networking Interface (CNI) Plugin now supports running more pods per node on AWS Nitro based EC2 instance types. To achieve higher pod density, the VPC CNI plugin leverages a new VPC capability that enables IP address prefixes to be attached to EC2 instances.
The VPC CNI plugin integrates directly with EC2 networking to provide high performance, low latency container networking in Kubernetes clusters running on AWS. With IP address prefix assignment, additional VPC IPv4 addresses can be attached to each worker node, enabling you to run more pods and fully utilize node resources on Nitro based EC2 instance types. Additionally, fewer network interfaces are required to allocate IP addresses for pods, which allows clusters to scale out faster in response to application usage spikes.
IP address prefix assignment can be enabled in VPC CNI version 1.9. To learn more, see EKS documentation and the v1.9 release notes on GitHub. You can upgrade existing EKS clusters to use VPC CNI v1.9 by following the instructions in the Amazon EKS documentation.