Amazon EKS Supports Horizontal Pod Autoscaling with Custom Metrics

The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) and Kubernetes Metrics Server are now supported by Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS). This makes it easy to scale your Kubernetes workloads managed by Amazon EKS in response to custom metrics.

Previously, HPA was not supported by Amazon EKS because any component with a dependency on API Aggregation, such as the Kubernetes Metrics Server, would not start if the core Kubernetes API server was not using Client Certificate Authentication. Amazon EKS uses only webhook authentication to provide integration with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Now, the Kubernetes Metrics Server supports webhook authentication, including with AWS IAM. This makes it possible to use the Kubernetes Metrics Server and Horizontal Pod Autoscaling for Amazon EKS clusters and ensures a consistent authentication mechanism for EKS clusters that maximizes cluster security. This allows you to scale your Kubernetes services based on metrics that you define, making it easier to run production workloads with Amazon EKS.

To get started with setting up the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler on an EKS cluster, see the Kubernetes documentation.

Visit the AWS region table to see all AWS regions where Amazon EKS is available.