In order to make Amazon EKS more reliable for users, Amazon is making changes to its version life cycle.
For security purposes, it will be deprecating Kubernetes 1.10 on July 22, 2019. Kubernetes 1.13 will be available in EKS a month earlier, in June.
In a blog post explaining the decision, Nathan Taber, senior product manager at AWS, and Michael Hausenblas, developer advocate at AWS, explained that after about one year, the Kubernetes community tends to stop releasing patches for bugs and CVEs. As a result, vulnerabilities in those older version may not be reported, which leaves users unknowingly exposed.
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Once Kubernetes 1.10 is deprecated, users will no longer be able to make new 1.10 clusters. Additionally, all clusters running 1.10 will be updated to Kubernetes 1.11, Amazon explained.
Amazon will be following a similar deprecation timeline going forward. It will run three production-ready versions at all times, with a fourth version in deprecation. The total time a version will be in production is about 270 days, Amazon explained.
It will announce the deprecation of Kubernetes versions at least 60 days before it is set to deprecate, and will align it with the date that Kubernetes stops supporting that version upstream,
Amazon recommends that in order to prepare for these changes, organizations should internalize this new timeline and align their internal processes with it.
