Define Container Runtime¶

Warning

Starting with Kubernetes version 1.24, dockershim support has been deprecated. Therefore, if you create a cluster using eksctl on version 1.24 or higher, the information below no longer applies, and the only supported container runtime is containerd. Trying to set it otherwise will return a validation error. Additionally, AL2023 AMIs only support containerd regadless of K8s version.

At some point, we will completely remove the option to set containerRuntime in config file, together with the support for older Kubernetes versions support (i.e. 1.22 or 1.23).

For AL2 ( AmazonLinux2 ) and Windows AMIs, it's possible to set container runtime to containerd.

Un-managed Nodes¶

For un-managed nodes, simply provide the following configuration when creating a new node:

apiVersion: eksctl.io/v1alpha5
kind: ClusterConfig

metadata:
  name: container-runtime-test
  region: us-west-2

nodeGroups:
  - name: ng-1
    instanceType: m5.xlarge
    desiredCapacity: 2
    amiFamily: AmazonLinux2
    containerRuntime: containerd

This value is set to dockerd by default to preserve backwards compatibility, but will soon be deprecated.

Note that there is no equivalent flag for setting the container runtime, this can only be done via a config file.

At the time of this writing the following container runtime values are allowed:

containerd
dockerd (docker for Windows)

Managed Nodes¶

For managed nodes we don't explicitly provide a bootstrap script, and thus it's up to the user to define a different runtime if they wish, using overrideBootstrapCommand. The overrideBootstrapCommand option requires that you specify an AMI for the managed node group.

managedNodeGroups:
  - name: m-ng-1
    ami: ami-XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
    instanceType: m5.large
    overrideBootstrapCommand: |
      #!/bin/bash
      /etc/eks/bootstrap.sh <cluster-name> <other flags> --container-runtime containerd

For Windows managed nodes, you will need to use a custom launch template with an ami-id and pass in the required bootstrap arguments in the userdata. Read more on creating a launch template, and using a launch template with eksctl.