Chkk + EKS Upgrade Insights
How Chkk Upgrade Copilot uses Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights
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, add-ons, and applications in your Kubernetes 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 Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights?
Upstream Kubernetes releases 2-3 new versions every year. Kubernetes 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 Kubernetes 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 Kubernetes 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 Kubernetes 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, add-ons, 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 Add-On Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Application to Nodes Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Add-on to Control Plane Compatibility | ✅ | Limited |
| Application to Control Plane (PDB, misconfigurations) | ✅ | ❌ |
| Application to Control Plane (API Deprecations) | ✅ | ✅ |
| Node to Control Plane | ✅ | ❌ |
| Add-on to Cloud Substrate Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
| Add-on to Add-on Compatibility | ✅ | ❌ |
Contextualized Release Notes
| Breaking changes, EOL detection, Default value changes | Chkk Upgrade Copilot | Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights |
|---|---|---|
| Clusters | ✅ | ❌ |
| Nodes | ✅ | ❌ |
| Add-ons | ✅ | ❌ |
| Cloud Substrate (IAM, LB, etc.) | ✅ | ❌ |
Upgrade Version Recommendations
| Next Version Recommendations & Upgrade Considerations | Chkk Upgrade Copilot | Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights |
|---|---|---|
| Add-ons | ✅ | ❌ |
| Nodes (Rolling vs Blue/Green) | ✅ | ❌ |
| Clusters (In-place vs Blue/Green) | ✅ | ❌ |
Safety, Health, and Readiness Checks
| Preflight, Inflight, Postflight Checks | Chkk Upgrade Copilot | Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights |
|---|---|---|
| Add-on Preflight/Postflight Checks (200+ checks) | ✅ | ❌ |
| Control Plane Preflight/Postflight Checks | ✅ | ✅ |
| Node Preflight/Postflight Checks | ✅ | ✅ |
| Support for Custom Checks | ✅ | ❌ |
Multi-cloud Support
| Clouds | Chkk Upgrade Copilot | Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights |
|---|---|---|
| EKS | ✅ | ✅ |
| GKE | ✅ | ❌ |
| AKS | ✅ | ❌ |
Additional Capabilities
| Other Features | Chkk Upgrade Copilot | Amazon EKS Upgrade Insights |
|---|---|---|
| Preverification on a Digital Twin | ✅ | ❌ |
| Stateful Workflow | ✅ | ❌ |
| Activity Stream | ✅ | ❌ |
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.
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