Amazon EKS open sources Pod Identity agent

Today, Amazon EKS open sourced the Pod Identity agent, providing customers with more options to package and deploy the agent into EKS clusters. Pod Identity is a feature of EKS that simplifies the process for cluster administrators to configure Kubernetes applications with AWS IAM permissions. A prerequisite for using the Pod Identity feature is running the Pod Identity agent on the cluster’s worker nodes. With the Pod Identity agent being open sourced, you can now build the agent on your own. This gives you various options to package and deploy the agent, enabling you to align with your organization’s deployment practices.

With access to the Pod Identity agent’s source code, you are able to inspect the source code and perform necessary scans as part of your build process. Additionally, you can choose to package and deploy the pod identity agent as a binary in your custom EKS AMI. Alternatively, you can build a container image from source code, and store it in your preferred container registry. You can then deploy the containerized agent using a Helm chart or as a Kubernetes manifest file.