July was a landmark month for the EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) crowd. AWS announced that EKS now supports 100,000-node clusters.
While 100k nodes might be overkill for most of us, the technical optimizations required to make the Kubernetes control plane stable at that scale benefit everyone. The scheduler is faster, and ETCD performance is more resilient.
But the real game-changer was EKS Auto Mode. This is the “No-Ops” evolution of Kubernetes. It removes the need to manage Node Groups or even Karpenter. AWS manages the worker plane entirely, selecting the best instance types based on pod requirements in real time.
If you’ve been avoiding Kubernetes because of the “operational tax,” July was the month that tax was significantly reduced. It’s the closest we’ve ever been to a truly serverless K8s experience.