Kubernetes is rapidly evolving, with frequent feature releases and bug fixes. Kubernetes version 1.12 brings a number of incremental improvements including egress network policies, performance improvements for the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), and several pod provisioning and management improvements.



Now, Amazon EKS supports Kubernetes version 1.12.6 for clusters and version 1.12.7 for the EKS-optimized AMIs. You can create new clusters using version 1.12 or update existing clusters. In addition to supporting cluster version updates through the EKS Console, API, or CLI, you can now use CloudFormation to update your cluster version by specifying a new Kubernetes version in the CloudFormation template for your cluster.



Learn more about the Kubernetes versions available for production workloads on Amazon EKS and how to migrate to new cluster versions in the EKS documentation.



Learn more about Kubernetes version 1.12 in the Kubernetes project release notes.



A note on Kubernetes version end of life

Concurrent with launch of 1.12 we are announcing our end of life policy. Amazon EKS support mirrors the Kubernetes community by providing full support for the 3 most recent releases. Kubernetes 1.10, 1.11, and 1.12 are all fully supported today, and new clusters can be started using any of these releases. However, it is important for each customer to consider moving forward to the most recent releases.



We recommend customers use the EKS updateClusterVersion API to upgrade existing 1.10 clusters to 1.11 or 1.12 as soon as practical.