At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025, AWS reaffirmed its leadership in the Kubernetes ecosystem through product enhancements, strategic investments, and platform simplification initiatives. With a renewed $3 million commitment in cloud credits to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), AWS continues to support the scalability and sustainability of Kubernetes. Meanwhile, recent advancements in Amazon EKS—including the Automode operation model and a new community add-ons catalog—demonstrate AWS’s focus on reducing operational complexity for developers and enterprises.
These initiatives reflect AWS’s broader goal: accelerating the journey from idea to production by providing infrastructure that scales with innovation, supports a range of operational models, and enhances the developer experience across hybrid, air-gapped, and public cloud environments.
AWS Automode and Simplified Kubernetes Adoption
Originally designed for Kubernetes experts, EKS has evolved into a full-fledged, enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform. The new “Automode” isn’t a net-new product but a new operational model that streamlines how customers consume EKS. It offers a ready-to-use cluster with compute, storage, and networking pre-integrated—reducing the need for extensive SRE or platform engineering teams. With one-click deployment and ongoing automated upgrades and patch management, Automode is ideal for startups and smaller organizations seeking scalable, secure Kubernetes environments with minimal overhead.
This move is particularly timely as generative AI and VMware environments drive new Kubernetes adoption among enterprise budget holders. AWS is adapting to serve a broader set of customers by abstracting away the complexities of Kubernetes infrastructure.
Extending Open Source Leadership and Community Support
In a major announcement at KubeCon, AWS extended its $3 million cloud credit donation to the CNCF through 2026. This funding supports the Kubernetes project’s infrastructure, enabling critical release-blocking tests, scalability experiments, and continuous integration on AWS infrastructure, including environments with up to 5,000 nodes. Since its initial support in 2019, AWS has become one of Kubernetes’ primary infrastructure backers, reinforcing its role in fostering open source innovation.
The announcement underscores AWS’s commitment to helping maintain a cost-efficient, scalable, and resilient environment for Kubernetes development. By hosting container images and ensuring compatibility with validated Kubernetes versions, AWS is directly empowering contributors, maintainers, and enterprise users alike.
EKS Add-Ons Catalog: Open Source Tools at Your Fingertips
The launch of the EKS community add-ons catalog is a major step toward simplifying Kubernetes operations. Accessible via the EKS console, CLI, API, or Infrastructure as Code tools, this catalog enables developers to deploy open-source tools with ease, bypassing multiple installation methods and sources. Each add-on is scanned, validated, and hosted in an AWS-managed ECR repository, ensuring security and version compatibility.
This catalog represents a significant usability leap by bringing production-grade open-source innovation directly into the managed Kubernetes experience. It also addresses the enterprise need for speed, compliance, and simplicity when integrating observability, networking, and security tools.
Supporting Hybrid, On-Prem, and Air-Gapped Deployments
As regulated industries and hybrid cloud users expand their Kubernetes adoption, AWS has enhanced EKS to support diverse deployment models. EKS now supports hybrid nodes that connect upstream Kubernetes clusters and on-prem environments to a unified control plane. Air-gapped versions of EKS support isolated environments where no internet connection is allowed, while still enabling secure, scheduled updates.
AWS also supports containerized workloads on VMware via the Elastic VMware Service (EVS), offering organizations a flexible migration path for legacy and mainframe applications. Rather than forcing modernization for its own sake, AWS advocates for practical modernization—extracting value where performance gains are possible and encapsulating systems to reduce vulnerability and skill gaps.
What’s Next?
AWS is doubling down on its role as both a cloud infrastructure provider and a key contributor to Kubernetes innovation. With the launch of Automode for Amazon EKS, a new open-source add-ons catalog, and enhanced support for hybrid and air-gapped deployments, AWS is removing complexity barriers and broadening Kubernetes adoption for enterprises of all sizes.
Its renewed investment in CNCF not only strengthens Kubernetes’ core infrastructure but also reinforces AWS’s leadership in the cloud-native ecosystem. As organizations seek faster paths from idea to production, AWS’s infrastructure, platform tools, and community contributions provide a robust foundation for innovation at scale—wherever workloads need to run.
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