Upgrade Amazon EKS Cluster Without Downtime | Full Guide 🔥

Upgrading your Amazon EKS cluster doesn’t have to be risky or confusing. In this video, I walk you through a clear, step-by-step approach to safely upgrade your EKS cluster in a production environment.

👉 What you’ll learn:

How to plan an EKS upgrade properly
Control plane vs node group upgrades
Pre-upgrade checks you should never skip
Zero-downtime upgrade strategies
Common mistakes and how to avoid them
Best practices for production environments

👉 Note:
In the video, I have explained to take the backup just for the specific workloads within all the namespaces but in real production grade environments we need to consider the backup of the following:

✅ Kubernetes Resources (via Velero)

All namespaces and namespace-scoped resources
Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, ReplicaSets
Services, Ingresses, NetworkPolicies
ConfigMaps and Secrets
PersistentVolumes and PersistentVolumeClaims
RBAC — Roles, ClusterRoles, RoleBindings, ClusterRoleBindings
ServiceAccounts and IRSA annotations
HPA, VPA, PodDisruptionBudgets
CRD definitions and all Custom Resource instances
CronJobs, Jobs
StorageClasses and VolumeSnapshotClasses

✅ AWS Infrastructure (via Terraform/IaC state)

EKS cluster configuration (version, networking, logging settings)
Node group configs (instance type, AMI ID, min/max/desired capacity)
Launch Templates and their versions
IAM Roles and Policies (especially IRSA roles)
VPC, Subnets, Route Tables, Security Groups
ALB/NLB listener rules, target groups, SSL certificates
ECR image repositories and images

✅ EKS Specific (Manual Export)

aws-auth ConfigMap (IAM to RBAC mappings)
EKS managed add-on names and their exact versions (CoreDNS, kube-proxy, VPC CNI, EBS CSI)
Cluster Autoscaler / Karpenter NodePool configurations
Kubeconfig file

✅ Storage & Data (App-level)

EBS volume snapshots for all attached volumes
Database dumps — pg_dump, mysqldump, mongodump before upgrade
Redis RDB/AOF persistence backup
Any in-cluster object storage data

✅ Helm & GitOps

Helm release list with chart versions (helm list -A)
Values for every Helm release (helm get values)
ArgoCD Application CRs and project configs
Flux Kustomization and HelmRelease objects
Confirm Git repo is up to date (source of truth)

✅ Observability & Add-ons

Prometheus rules and alerting configs
Grafana dashboards (export as JSON)
Fluentd/FluentBit ConfigMaps for log routing
Cert-manager certificates and cluster issuers
External-DNS configurations
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► ▬▬▬▬▬▬ GitHub Link for notes 🚀 ▬▬▬▬▬▬
https://github.com/gauri17-pro/eks-cluster-upgrade.git

► ▬▬▬▬▬▬ Reference links ▬▬▬▬▬▬
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/update-cluster.html

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► ▬▬▬▬▬▬ Disclaimer 💁‍♀️ ▬▬▬▬▬▬
This video is solely made for educational purposes

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