Amazon EKS introduces Provisioned Control Plane

Amazon EKS introduces Provisioned Control Plane Delivering predictable and high performance at scale How did we unlock this? Getting started with Provisioned Control Plane Creating a cluster with Provisioned Control Plane Updating control plane scaling tier Monitoring control plane scaling tier utilization Benchmarking with Provisioned Control Plane Conclusion About the authors Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) powers tens of millions of clusters annually, with an architecture refined by years of real-world insights from thousands of customers running diverse workloads. EKS automatically scales your cluster’s control plane to meet your workload demands. This dynamic, intelligent scaling powers most use cases, handling everything from startup applications to enterprise platforms to mission critical workloads. Building on this proven architecture, we’re introducing capabilities designed for next-generation workloads with specialized requirements. When you’re running AI training or inference workloads at ultra scale, running multi-tenant SaaS platforms, or running mission-critical web applications where every second matters, you need absolute predictability – the ability to guarantee control plane responsiveness before peak demand arrives. To meet these advanced requirements, we’re introducing EKS Provisioned Control Plane, an enhanced option that complements the Standard Control Plane capabilities. Amazon EKS Provisioned Control Plane gives you the ability to pre-allocate control plane capacity from a set of new scaling tiers, ensuring predictable and high performance for your most demanding workloads. By provisioning capacity ahead of time, your cluster handles instantaneous traffic bursts without the need for control plane scaling, which is crucial for serving traffic during high-demand events or sudden workload spikes. These new scaling tiers unlock significantly higher control plane performance and scalability required for emerging workload patterns like ultra scale AI training/inference, high performance computing, or large-scale data processing. Provisioned Control Plane allows you to choose from multiple control plane scaling tiers (XL, 2XL, 4XL) with each tier offering well defined performance on these Kubernetes attributes: API request concurrency – the volume of requests processed by the Kubernetes API servers concurrently Pod scheduling rate – the throughput at which the Kubernetes default scheduler assigns pods to nodes Cluster database size – the storage space allocated to etcd, the database that holds the cluster state/metadata Once you designate a scaling tier to your cluster, EKS ensures sufficient capacity is always available to the control plane to meet the attribute values for that tier. You also get comprehensive visibility into your tier utilization through granular metrics for each attribute, available through both the EKS Prometheus metrics endpoint and Amazon CloudWatch metrics vended to your account. As your workload demands evolve, you can switch between scaling tiers or go back to the standard control plane at any time.