Upgrade Amazon EKS Cluster Without Downtime | Full Guide 🔥

Upgrading your Amazon EKS cluster doesn’t have to be risky or confusing. In this video, I walk you through a clear, step-by-step approach to safely upgrade your EKS cluster in a production environment. 👉 What you’ll learn: How to plan an EKS upgrade properly Control plane vs node group upgrades Pre-upgrade checks you should never skip Zero-downtime upgrade strategies Common mistakes and how to avoid them Best practices for production environments 👉 Note: In the video, I have explained to take the backup just for the specific workloads within all the namespaces but in real production grade environments we need to consider the backup of the following: ✅ Kubernetes Resources (via Velero) All namespaces and namespace-scoped resources Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, ReplicaSets Services, Ingresses, NetworkPolicies ConfigMaps and Secrets PersistentVolumes and PersistentVolumeClaims RBAC — Roles, ClusterRoles, RoleBindings, ClusterRoleBindings ServiceAccounts and IRSA annotations HPA, VPA, PodDisruptionBudgets CRD definitions and all Custom Resource instances CronJobs, Jobs StorageClasses and VolumeSnapshotClasses ✅ AWS Infrastructure (via Terraform/IaC state) EKS cluster configuration (version, networking, logging settings) Node group configs (instance type, AMI ID, min/max/desired capacity) Launch Templates and their versions IAM Roles and Policies (especially IRSA roles) VPC, Subnets, Route Tables, Security Groups ALB/NLB listener rules, target groups, SSL certificates ECR image repositories and images ✅ EKS Specific (Manual Export) aws-auth ConfigMap (IAM to RBAC mappings) EKS managed add-on names and their exact versions (CoreDNS, kube-proxy, VPC CNI, EBS CSI) Cluster Autoscaler / Karpenter NodePool configurations Kubeconfig file ✅ Storage & Data (App-level) EBS volume snapshots for all attached volumes Database dumps — pg_dump, mysqldump, mongodump before upgrade Redis RDB/AOF persistence backup Any in-cluster object storage data ✅ Helm & GitOps Helm release list with chart versions (helm list -A) Values for every Helm release (helm get values) ArgoCD Application CRs and project configs Flux Kustomization and HelmRelease objects Confirm Git repo is up to date (source of truth) ✅ Observability & Add-ons Prometheus rules and alerting configs Grafana dashboards (export as JSON) Fluentd/FluentBit ConfigMaps for log routing Cert-manager certificates and cluster issuers External-DNS configurations 🔔 Subscribe to Code With Gauri If you’re learning DevOps, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD, don’t forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon for regular hands-on projects. ►Support my work: https://buymeacoffee.com/gauris18 ► ▬▬▬▬▬▬ GitHub Link for notes 🚀 ▬▬▬▬▬▬ https://github.com/gauri17-pro/eks-cl... ► ▬▬▬▬▬▬ Reference links ▬▬▬▬▬▬ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/lates... ► ▬▬▬▬▬▬ Subscribe 🚀 ▬▬▬▬▬▬    / @codewithgauri   ► ▬▬▬▬▬▬ Connect with me 👋 ▬▬▬▬▬▬ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/gauri-shirkande ► ▬▬▬▬▬▬ Disclaimer 💁‍♀️ ▬▬▬▬▬▬ This video is solely made for educational purposes ► ▬▬▬▬▬▬ Email 📩 ▬▬▬▬▬▬ [email protected] #eks #project #devops #upgrade #aws