Cloud & Infrastructure Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published Feb 2, 2026 4 min read

EKS Cluster Upgrade Strategy

K8s upgrades come quarterly. The strategy that keeps clusters current without breaking workloads.

Cadence

Stay within 2 versions of latest. Older versions lose support.

Plan an upgrade quarterly; execute one every 2 quarters.

Upgrade a non-prod cluster first. Run real workloads for a week.

Validate addons, network policies, custom resources.

Upgrade dev → staging → prod. Each stage gives feedback.

Surge upgrade strategy: launch new nodes, drain old, terminate.