Amazon EKS — EKS Add-ons & Ecosystem
EKS Add-ons & Ecosystem
The EKS ecosystem extends far beyond core Kubernetes. Here are the essential tools and add-ons for production clusters.
AWS-Managed EKS Add-ons
| Add-on | Purpose | Install |
|---|---|---|
| VPC CNI | Pod networking | Pre-installed |
| CoreDNS | Cluster DNS | Pre-installed |
| kube-proxy | Service networking | Pre-installed |
| EBS CSI Driver | EBS volumes | aws eks create-addon --addon-name aws-ebs-csi-driver |
| EFS CSI Driver | EFS file system | aws eks create-addon --addon-name aws-efs-csi-driver |
| ADOT | OpenTelemetry collector | aws eks create-addon --addon-name adot |
| CloudWatch Agent | Container Insights | aws eks create-addon --addon-name amazon-cloudwatch-observability |
| GuardDuty Agent | Security monitoring | aws eks create-addon --addon-name aws-guardduty-agent |
Popular Community Tools
| Category | Tool | What It Does |
|---|---|---|
| Service Mesh | Istio / Linkerd | mTLS, traffic management, observability |
| Secrets | External Secrets Operator | Sync AWS Secrets Manager → K8s Secrets |
| Policy | OPA Gatekeeper / Kyverno | Policy enforcement |
| Backup | Velero | Cluster backup and restore |
| Cost | Kubecost / OpenCost | Cost visibility per namespace/team |
| GitOps | ArgoCD / Flux | Git-driven deployments |
| Scaling | KEDA | Event-driven autoscaling |
| Certificates | cert-manager | Auto TLS certificate management |
What’s Next?
Scale to many clusters: Multi-Cluster Management.
