EKS Version Upgrades Without a Maintenance Window: APIs, Add-Ons and PDB Deadlocks
The control plane bump is the part AWS handles and almost never breaks. The damage happens in the data plane rollout afterwards. A practical walk through the three failure families that actually stall EKS version upgrades: removed APIs you did not know you were calling, add-on updates that silently discard your configuration, and pod disruption budgets that deadlock the node drain, plus what each escape hatch really costs.