Implications of automatic EKS Platform version update

Question

Below is quoted from the document about Amazon EKS platform versions

> When new Amazon EKS platform versions become available for a minor version:
> * The Amazon EKS platform version number is incremented (eks.).
* Amazon EKS automatically upgrades all existing clusters to the latest Amazon EKS platform version for their corresponding Kubernetes minor version.
* Amazon EKS might publish a new node AMI with a corresponding patch version. However, all patch versions are compatible between the EKS control plane and node AMIs for a given Kubernetes minor version.

I have a no. of questions about the second bullet above.

1. When an Amazon EKS platform is updated, will all the underlying pods in each k8s cluster be drained and updated in a rolling manner?
2. Will any notifications be sent prior to a EKS platform update ?
3. Is EKS platform version update a scheduled update as done in RDS ?

Answer

1. The automatic upgrade process for the cluster referenced in the documentation is scooped to control plane components. As the documentation stated, the patch version in worker nodes should be compatible throughout the minor version upgrades. If you use managed node group(s) and decided to upgrade the worker nodes when new AMI is released it would be a rolling upgrade. 
2. Not exactly. However you can either subscribe to the EKS-D updates SNS topic: arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:379412251201:eks-distro-updates ([reference](https://github.com/aws/eks-distro)) or refer [here](https://distro.eks.amazonaws.com/#release-channels). 
3. In short, minor (non-breaking) updates are not. You generally have to manually trigger an update for major releases. You can reference to the following [workshop](https://www.eksworkshop.com/intermediate/320_eks_upgrades/).

Implications of automatic EKS Platform version update

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