What is Chkk Upgrade Copilot?
Chkk Upgrade Copilot is your trusted expert that provides a comprehensive set of recommendations, stateful workflows, and safety tooling to help you upgrade cloud substrate, control plane, nodes, Cloud Native Projects, application services, and applications in your infrastructure. Chkk Upgrade Copilot gives the peace of mind that your upgrades are verified to succeed, while saving months of effort spent on preparing, staging, and executing upgrades.What is the Chkk Upgrade Agent?
The Upgrade Agent is part of Chkk’s Lifecycle Management Agents. It runs in your IDE and applies environment‑aware upgrade workflows to your IaC. The agent is powered by the Upgrade Context MCP server, which connects your Upgrade Plans to your IDE by providing precise, just‑in‑time context for safe software upgrades. You can integrate the Upgrade Agent (via the Upgrade Context MCP server) into existing IDEs like Cursor and Claude Code (GitHub Copilot and others coming soon).What is Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights?
Upstream releases come 2-3 times every year. APIs continue to get deprecated and removed in each release. Any application using a removed API risks disruption if it’s not upgraded to supported APIs before cluster upgrade. EKS Upgrade Insights highlights deprecated and removed APIs being used by applications. According to AWS: “Upgrade insights scans cluster’s audit logs for events related to APIs that have been deprecated. These events include information about who initiated it (i.e., the caller) and the Cloud Native resource(s) that it was initiated against. Upgrade Insights presents this information to you in a concise and easily consumable way so you can identify and remediate the appropriate resources before executing the upgrade.” The information can also be retrieved programmatically using the Amazon EKS API or the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). Insight statuses:- Error: Impacted in the next version (N+1).
- Warning: Impacted in a future version (N+2 or more).
- Passing: No issues detected.
- Unknown: Unable to determine impact.
How does Chkk Upgrade Copilot use Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights?
For EKS customers, Chkk uses EKS Upgrade Insights to detect APIs that have been deprecated and can cause application failures. Chkk also uses EKS Insights about version skew between control plane and kubelet versions in it’s Upgrade Plans. While API deprecations/removals and version skew are critical to identify and address before an upgrade, there are many other dependencies, incompatibilities, and safety/availability risks across layers of infrastructure (cloud substrate, control plane, nodes, Cloud Native Projects, application services, and applications) that must be addressed to derisk upgrades. For reference, a typical cluster Upgrade Plan from Chkk comprises 80+ steps. API deprecations/removals and version skew are only relevant for a handful of these steps.Comparison Table
Multi-layer Dependency Analysis| Cascading Incompatibilities, Misconfigurations, Coupled Changes | Chkk Upgrade Copilot | Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights |
|---|---|---|
| Application to Project Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Application to Application Service Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Application to Operator Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Application to Nodes Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Project to Control Plane Compatibility | ✅ | Limited |
| Application Service to Control Plane Compatibility | ✅ | Limited |
| Operator to Control Plane Compatibility | ✅ | Limited |
| Application to Control Plane (PDB, misconfigurations) | ✅ | ❌ |
| Application to Control Plane (API Deprecations) | ✅ | ✅ |
| Node to Control Plane | ✅ | ❌ |
| Project to Cloud Substrate Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Application Service to Cloud Substrate Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Operator to Cloud Substrate Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Project to Project Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Project to Application Service Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Project to Operator Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Application Service to Application Service Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Application Service to Operator Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Breaking changes, EOL detection, Default value changes | Chkk Upgrade Copilot | Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights |
|---|---|---|
| Clusters | ✅ | ❌ |
| Nodes | ✅ | ❌ |
| Projects | ✅ | ❌ |
| Application Services | ✅ | ❌ |
| Operators | ✅ | ❌ |
| Cloud Substrate (IAM, LB, etc.) | ✅ | ❌ |
| Next Version Recommendations & Upgrade Considerations | Chkk Upgrade Copilot | Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights |
|---|---|---|
| Projects | ✅ | ❌ |
| Application Services | ✅ | ❌ |
| Operators | ✅ | ❌ |
| Nodes (Rolling vs Blue/Green) | ✅ | ❌ |
| Clusters (In-place vs Blue/Green) | ✅ | ❌ |
| Preflight, Inflight, Postflight Checks | Chkk Upgrade Copilot | Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights |
|---|---|---|
| Project Preflight/Postflight Checks | ✅ | ❌ |
| Application Services Preflight/Postflight Checks | ✅ | ❌ |
| Operators Preflight/Postflight Checks | ✅ | ❌ |
| Control Plane Preflight/Postflight Checks | ✅ | ✅ |
| Node Preflight/Postflight Checks | ✅ | ✅ |
| Support for Custom Checks | ✅ | ❌ |
| Clouds | Chkk Upgrade Copilot | Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights |
|---|---|---|
| EKS | ✅ | ✅ |
| GKE | ✅ | ❌ |
| AKS | ✅ | ❌ |
| Other Features | Chkk | Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights |
|---|---|---|
| Preverification on a Digital Twin | ✅ | ❌ |
| Stateful Workflow | ✅ | ❌ |
| Activity Stream | ✅ | ❌ |
| Upgrade Context MCP Server | ✅ | ❌ |
| Upgrade Agent | ✅ | ❌ |
Summary
- EKS Upgrade Insights focuses on detecting API deprecations/removals and ControlPlane-to-Node version skew.
- Chkk Upgrade Copilot provides a complete upgrade solution by identifying hidden dependencies, unknown incompatibilities, misconfigurations, and breaking changes across all infrastructure layers.
- Chkk includes preflight/postflight checks, contextual release notes, preverification on a digital twin, and stateful workflows to ensure upgrade success.
- Chkk supports multi-cloud environments (EKS, GKE, AKS), while EKS Upgrade Insights is specific to AWS.