Posted On: Apr 12, 2023

Kubernetes 1.26 introduced several new features and bug fixes, and AWS is excited to announce that you can now use Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro to run Kubernetes version 1.26. Starting today, you can create new 1.26 clusters or upgrade your existing clusters to 1.26 using the Amazon EKS console, the eksctl command line interface, or through an infrastructure-as-code tool.

Highlights of this Kubernetes version include stable support for Windows privileged containers and mixed protocols in services of type LoadBalancer, as well as scheduling improvements including controlling whether to take taints/tolerations into consideration when calculating Pod Topology Spread skew. For detailed information on major changes in Kubernetes 1.26, see the Amazon EKS blog post and the Kubernetes project release notes

Kubernetes 1.26 support for Amazon EKS is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon EKS is available, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

You can learn more about the Kubernetes versions available on Amazon EKS and instructions to update your cluster to version 1.26 by visiting Amazon EKS documentation. Amazon EKS Distro builds of Kubernetes 1.26 are available through ECR Public Gallery and GitHub. Learn more about the Amazon EKS version lifecycle policies in the documentation.