Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro now supports Kubernetes version 1.36

Kubernetes version 1.36 introduced several new features and bug fixes, and AWS is excited to announce that you can now use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Amazon EKS Distro to run Kubernetes version 1.36. Starting today, you can create new EKS clusters using version 1.36 and upgrade existing clusters to version 1.36 using the EKS console, the eksctl command line interface, or through an infrastructure-as-code tool.

Kubernetes version 1.36 introduces several key improvements, promoting User Namespaces to general availability for mapping container root to an unprivileged host user so that a breakout grants no node-level privileges, alongside Mutating Admission Policies for CEL-based resource mutations in the API server without webhook infrastructure. The release also brings In-Place Pod-Level Resources Vertical Scaling allowing Pods to resize their shared CPU and memory budget without restart, and Resource Health Status reporting device health in Pod status to help identify hardware-caused crash loops. To learn more about the changes in Kubernetes version 1.36, see our documentation and the Kubernetes project release notes.

EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.36 in all the AWS Regions where EKS is available, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

You can learn more about the Kubernetes versions available on EKS and instructions to update your cluster to version 1.36 by visiting EKS documentation. You can use EKS cluster insights to check if there are any issues that can impact your Kubernetes cluster upgrades. EKS Distro builds of Kubernetes version 1.36 are available through ECR Public Gallery and GitHub. Learn more about the EKS version lifecycle policies in the documentation.