Amazon EKS Capabilities Drive ‘Opinionated’ Workload Orchestration and Resource Management
Among the more directly cloud-native developments tabled by AWS at re:Invent 2025 in Las Vegas this month was news of updates to capabilities in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).
This is an “extensible set” of Kubernetes-native solutions that streamline workload orchestration, AWS cloud resource management and Kubernetes resource composition and orchestration.
Extensibility, Explained
AWS likes to use the term extensible as a sort of marketing label to denote some kind of flexibility; in technical terms, it actually means that cloud-native software developers can “extend” the functionality of any given piece of tooling to customize its behavior or integrate it with third-party tools without having to redesign an entire service or application.
The managed and integrated platform capabilities on offer here include open source Kubernetes services that many customers are using today, such as Argo CD, AWS Controllers for Kubernetes, and Kube Resource Orchestrator.
“With EKS capabilities, [cloud developers] can build and scale Kubernetes applications without managing complex solution infrastructure. Unlike typical in-cluster installations, these capabilities actually run in EKS service-owned accounts that are fully abstracted from customers,” explained AWS blogger Channy Yun.
This Is Not Serverless
Although the automated infrastructure provisioning services on offer here almost sound like serverless computing (where a cloud developer doesn’t have to worry about underlying core system resources at the point of deployment), this service tips further towards managing the ongoing mechanics of infrastructure once a cloud-native app is up and running.
To clarify, AWS is saying that it will look after managing infrastructure scaling, patching, and updates of these cluster capabilities as they run. Developers (and their users) can therefore gain enterprise reliability and security without needing to maintain and manage the underlying components.
Let’s break down the three components on offer here:
- Argo CD is a declarative GitOps tool for Kubernetes that provides continuous deployment (CD) capabilities for Kubernetes.
- AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) provides custom resources for Kubernetes that enable the management of AWS Cloud resources directly from within clusters.
- Kube Resource Orchestrator (KRO) – KRO provides a streamlined way to create and manage custom resources (and create reusable resource bundles) in Kubernetes.
Opinionated, But Flexible
This set of technologies enables developers to drive with what we can call “opinionated but flexible features” so that scaling and deployment acceleration in general are given a level of autopilot control. The opinionated element comes from a number of foundational cluster capabilities that layer with each other to provide integrated features for continuous deployment, resource orchestration and composition.
AWS’ Yun explains that Platform engineers and cluster administrators can set up EKS Capabilities to offload building and managing custom cloud services to provide common foundational services, meaning they can focus on more differentiated features that matter to a business.
There’s more opinionatedness in the upgrade functionality here, EKS automatically updates cluster capabilities that a cloud developer might enable along with their related dependencies. Of all things not to worry about having an opinion on, iron-clad dependencies that need to exist as synaptic bonds between applications or application services is something not to have a strong opinion on, so AWS doesn’t (figuratively speaking) here.
EKS Cluster Insights
The technology automatically analyzes a deployment for breaking changes, patches and updates components as needed. It then informs the developer of conflicts or issues through the EKS cluster insights.
“ACK provides resource adoption features that enable migration of existing AWS resources into ACK management. ACK also provides read-only resources which can help facilitate a step-wise migration from provisioned resources with Terraform, AWS CloudFormation into EKS Capabilities,” blogged Yun.
To enable EKS Capabilities, developers can use the EKS console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), eksctl (a command-line utility tool that automates and simplifies the process of creating & operating Amazon EKS clusters), or other preferred tools.
