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Amazon EKS Anywhere

What it is

Amazon EKS Anywhere creates and operates Kubernetes clusters on your own on-premises infrastructure, using the same Amazon EKS Distro (EKS-D) that powers managed EKS in the cloud. Unlike EKS Hybrid Nodes (which keeps a managed control plane in an AWS Region), EKS Anywhere runs the entire cluster — control plane and data plane — on customer hardware. It supports several infrastructure providers, including a bare-metal provider.

This makes it the fit for environments that must keep the Kubernetes control plane on-premises for data-sovereignty, regulatory, or policy reasons, or where the network to AWS is disconnected, disrupted, intermittent, or limited (DDIL). (Source: sources/2026-09-01-aws-hybrid-cloud-orchestration-modernizing-on-premises-infrastructure)

How a bare-metal cluster is built

A configuration file plus a hardware inventory CSV (servers + network details) is passed to the EKS Anywhere CLI, which:

  1. Network-boots the listed servers,
  2. Installs the operating system and Kubernetes,
  3. Brings up the cluster.

Two cluster types:

  • Management clusters — dedicated clusters hosting orchestration components that manage the lifecycle of workload clusters.
  • Workload clusters — application-hosting clusters managed by their corresponding management cluster.

Lifecycle is the customer's responsibility

Cluster lifecycle operations and maintenance (creation, scaling, version upgrades, termination) are the customer's responsibility — which is exactly the work an event-driven orchestration engine automates across many sites. In the hybrid-orchestration reference architecture, EKS Anywhere commands are executed against on-prem servers through Systems Manager (SSM) and AWS Batch; the configuration file comes from a blueprint in the Cluster Catalog and the hardware CSV comes from the DynamoDB Inventory Management System.

When to use the alternative

If on-premises or edge environments have reliable connectivity to an AWS Region, Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes (managed cloud control plane, on-prem worker nodes) is the recommended approach instead.

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