Amazon EKS

Amazon EKS and EKS Distro now support Kubernetes 1.37, allowing new clusters to be created or existing clusters upgraded to this version via the EKS console, eksctl, or infrastructure-as-code tools. This version brings the Metrics API to general availability, graduates Dynamic Resource Allocation device taints and tolerations to general availability, and moves Horizontal Pod Autoscaler scale-to-zero to beta enabled by default.

Matters for: Relevant for teams running GPU workloads with Dynamic Resource Allocation and those using Horizontal Pod Autoscaler with minReplicas set to zero for idle workload scaling.

Cluster administrators can now revert an EKS control plane to its previous Kubernetes version within 7 days of an upgrade, with automated compatibility and health checks (Rollback Readiness Insights) run before and during the rollback; for EKS Auto Mode clusters, rollback also covers the data plane, rolling back worker nodes first while honoring NodePool disruption budgets and PodDisruptionBudgets. This removes the need for blue/green deployments or manual state snapshots previously used as rollback safety nets, and in-progress rollbacks can be canceled via the CancelUpdate API.

Matters for: Platform engineers and cluster administrators responsible for upgrading production EKS fleets, especially those using EKS Auto Mode with Karpenter-managed node pools.