Find the detailed EKS Version

QUICK FIX #5

In QUICK FIX posts I narrowly focus on issues that I’ve came across while working or hobby-ing in software development in the wild. The issues could be bugs; nuances of the program or service in question; or simply my own misunderstanding. Or something in-between. The goal is to quickly help people out who come across the same problem.

Sometimes you may need to grab the detailed AWS EKS version of your cluster — for example in for a support case or when providing issue details or just for your own documentation.

I’m talking about the one that looks like this: v1.16.8-eks-e16311

I was looking in the console which provides the major.minor version and my node AMI version but I couldn’t find it there and then I was searching for AWS docs and CLI commands and such.

Solution

The answer — and it is a very obvious one — is to just get the cluster version the same way that you would for any cluster…

kubectl version

This outputs the kubectl tool version and the cluster version.

Here you can see the results when ran against an EKS cluster:

I have the latest kubectl GitVersion:”v1.18.5" and there is the cluster version GitVersion:”v1.16.8-eks-e16311" .

And I also tried on my docker-desktop cluster for illustration: GitVersion:”v1.15.5" .

Note that you can use the --client flag to filter out the cluster version from output[0] but there is no --server flag to do the same thing — this could be a really simple feature if someone wanted to implement it.

References

[0]: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/kubectl/overview/