Moving EKS add-ons from self-managed to managed

EKS add-ons are like plugins for your Kubernetes cluster. They provide operational capabilities support to Kubernetes applications. There are quite a number of add-ons provided by AWS and these can be either self-managed or managed. Examples of these are kube-proxy, coredns and vpc-cni.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/eks-add-ons.html

For self-managed add-ons, you will be handling their maintenance and upgrade. You will have to update the manifest and deploy it to your cluster, whereas for managed add-ons, you just need to specify the version that you need and AWS will handle the rest for you behind the scene.

If you are using managed add-ons and want to transit to self-managed, you can also easily do so by deleting the add-on with the Preserve on the cluster flag (or --preserve if you are using CLI). AWS will then stop managing the add-on and the add-on will be retained in your cluster. However, if you want to transit from self-managed to managed add-ons, you will probably wonder how to do it as there is no documentation on this (at the point of writing).

This blog post will show you examples of how it can be done easily.

Example 1: kube-proxy

By default, kube-proxy is already installed in your EKS cluster in the kube-system namespace. In our test cluster, we are using the v1.24.7-eksbuild.1 version and we do not have any managed add-ons.