<ul data-eligibleForWebStory="true"><li>Amazon EKS upgrades are complex engineering efforts touching infrastructure, application reliability, and organization readiness.</li><li>The guide divides the upgrade lifecycle into Pre-Upgrade Planning, High Availability Execution, and Post-Upgrade Validation phases.</li><li>Pre-Upgrade involves backups, compatibility audits, staging, and change management.</li><li>High Availability & Zero Downtime Upgrade focuses on control plane and node group upgrades with best practices for Node Drain and add-ons.</li><li>Security hardening and observability are crucial during upgrades using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and CloudWatch.</li><li>Post-Upgrade includes validation, rollback strategies via Helm or GitOps, cleanup, and automation suggestions.</li><li>Key takeaways highlight treating upgrades as lifecycle workflows, continuous observation, and smart engineering practices.</li><li>The article emphasizes automation and best practices, featuring bonus resources and a conclusion on EKS upgrade mastery.</li></ul>

A Complete Guide to EKS Upgrades: Zero Downtime, Full Automation, and Enterprise-Scale Strategies

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