Amazon EKS now supports UDP load balancing with Network Load Balancer

Posted on: Aug 13, 2020

You can now use a Network Load Balancer (NLB) to distribute UDP traffic to container-based applications running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Network Load Balancers are fully-managed load balancers that operate at the connection level (Layer-4) and are capable of handling millions of requests at ultra-low latency. Until now, you could use Network Load Balancers on Amazon EKS only with the TCP protocol. With this new integration, you can run workloads such as DNS, IoT, real-time media, and syslog using UDP protocol, allowing high throughput at ultra low latency through the Network Load Balancer.

Support for the UDP protocol through a Network Load Balancer is available for services in new EKS clusters running Kubernetes version 1.15 and above with EC2 instance based worker nodes. Pods running on AWS Fargate are not supported at this time. Support for existing clusters will be rolled out over the coming weeks. For more information, please see Amazon EKS documentation and the Network Load Balancer documentation.