Pod Networking

When creating a EKS cluster the Amazon VPC CNI will be used by default for Pod Networking.

When using the AWS Console to create an EKS cluster with a Kubernetes version of v1.18 or greater you are required to select a specific version of the VPC CNI to use.

Using the VPC CNI Addon

You can use an explicit version of the Amazon VPC CNI by using the vpc-cni EKS addon. See the addons documentation for further details of how to use addons.

Using an alternative CNI

There may be scenarios where you do not want to use the Amazon VPC CNI. EKS supports a number of alternative CNIs such as Calico and Weave Net (see docs for full list).

There are a number of ways to install an alternative CNI into the cluster. One option is to use a ClusterResourceSet to apply the required artifacts to a newly provisioned cluster.

When using an alternative CNI you will want to delete the Amazon VPC CNI, especially for a cluster using v1.17 or less. This can be done via the disableVPCCNI property of the AWSManagedControlPlane:

kind: AWSManagedControlPlane
apiVersion: controlplane.cluster.x-k8s.io/v1beta1
metadata:
  name: "capi-managed-test-control-plane"
spec:
  region: "eu-west-2"
  sshKeyName: "capi-management"
  version: "v1.18.0"
  disableVPCCNI: true

You cannot set disableVPCCNI to true if you are using the VPC CNI addon or if you have specified a secondary CIDR block.

Additional Information

See the AWS documentation for further details of EKS pod networking.