EKS 24 charges $0.10 per cluster per hour for the control plane, about $73 a month however little the cluster runs, with a 99.95% uptime SLA and no free tier. Each Kubernetes 5,150 minor gets 14 months of standard support after EKS releases it, then 12 months of extended support at $0.60 an hour. Extended support is on by default, so a cluster left on an old version quietly costs six times as much; after 26 months EKS upgrades the control plane itself, but not your node groups.
On 26 September 2026 EKS offers 1.36, 1.35 and 1.34 in standard support and 1.33 to 1.31 in extended support. 1.36 reached EKS on 2 June 2026, six weeks after upstream; 1.37 has not arrived yet. Nodes cost what their EC2 24 instances cost; EKS Auto Mode runs them for you (Karpenter 676,493 inside, Cluster Autoscaler) for a fee per instance, and Fargate 24 bills each Pod per second for its vCPU and memory.
The official command-line tool is eksctl 24 (github.com/eksctl-io/eksctl (https://github.com/eksctl-io/eksctl 5,214 ), 0.230.0 of 14 August 2026, installed here from its release tarball). Its default --version is still 1.34, so name the version:
eksctl create cluster --name booknest --region us-east-1 --version 1.36 \
--nodegroup-name general --node-type t3.medium --nodes 2
aws eks update-kubeconfig --name booknest --region us-east-1 # from another machine
eksctl delete cluster --name booknest --region us-east-1 --waitThe kubeconfig holds no password: an exec plugin (kubeconfig and Contexts) runs aws eks get-token for a short-lived token signed by your IAM identity.