Introducing Amazon EKS Distro - an open source Kubernetes distribution used by Amazon EKS.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Distro is the same Kubernetes distribution used by Amazon EKS for customers who create Kubernetes clusters manually wherever their applications are deployed. Amazon EKS Distro provides builds and code of open source Kubernetes, etcd, CoreDNS, upstream CNI Core binaries, CSI Sidecar Containers, and the latest security patches. Amazon EKS Distro is available as an open source project from GitHub and Amazon ECR Public Gallery.
Clusters created with EKS Distro releases will be running the same Kubernetes releases, version aligned dependencies, and security patches deployed by Amazon EKS to create and self-manage reliable and secure Kubernetes clusters. Amazon EKS Distro mitigates the overhead of tracking the complex matrix of updates and security patches by enabling customers to subscribe to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) EKS Distro topic. EKS Distro also provides extended support for Kubernetes versions with backported patches for versions supported by Amazon EKS after community support expires. Now customers can rely on a common source for notifications of new EKS Distro releases with Kubernetes, dependency updates, and Kubernetes Common Vulnerability and Exposures (CVE) patches.
You can get started with EKS Distro by following the guidance on cluster creation using kops, kubeadm, or your own tools as described in our documentation on GitHub. You also have the option to reproduce builds of EKS Distro with the provided build environment settings, tools, and hashes of our published images to confirm your download has not been tampered in transit. For more details please visit the Amazon EKS Distro product page and Amazon EKS User Guide for documentation.