Deep dive: Simplifying resource orchestration with Amazon EKS Capabilities

Deep dive: Simplifying resource orchestration with Amazon EKS Capabilities The Kubernetes Resource Model and EKS capabilities EKS capabilities at-a-glance Getting started with enabling ACK and kro capabilities Prerequisites Step by step guide: What happens behind the scenes Declarative AWS Resources Management: Complex application stacks orchestration: Solution walkthrough: Key considerations Multi-cluster management Monitoring and operations Cleanup Conclusion About the authors As organizations scale their Kubernetes operations, teams face mounting operational complexity. While teams focus on building and deploying applications, they must also maintain Kubernetes platform components like GitOps controllers and infrastructure orchestrators. This dual burden slows development velocity and diverts engineering resources from building features to operating platform tools. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Capabilities address these challenges with a fully managed, Kubernetes-native tools for both Amazon EKS standard and EKS Auto Mode that runs in AWS-managed infrastructure. Figure 1: EKS Managed Capabilities with standard Amazon EKS cluster Figure 2: EKS Managed Capabilities with Amazon EKS Auto Mode cluster Since the launch, three foundational capabilities are available: continuous deployment with Argo CD, AWS resource management through AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) , and dynamic resource orchestration using Kube Resource Orchestrator (kro). This unified approach accelerates deployment velocity, enabling platform teams to support more applications while maintaining consistent security and compliance standards across all clusters. This blog post focuses on ACK and kro capabilities. For a deep dive on Amazon EKS capability for Argo CD, check out Deep dive: Streamlining GitOps with Amazon EKS capability for Argo CD. The Kubernetes Resource Model provides a declarative framework where you define your desired state, and Kubernetes continuously reconciles the actual state with your intentions. ACK and kro extend this model in complementary ways: ACK enables the management of AWS resources using Kubernetes APIs, allowing you to create and manage Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) databases, IAM roles and other AWS resources as if they were Kubernetes resources. kro enables you to create custom Kubernetes APIs that compose multiple resources into higher-level abstractions, which lets infrastructure teams define reusable patterns for common resource combinations. By combining kro and ACK you can compose both Kubernetes and cloud resources into unified abstractions.