[EKS] [request]: Allow option/placeholder to manage automatic updates for AWS EKS Addons

[pramodpawade]

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Tell us about your request
I want to be able to manage the updates of EKS Addons automatically as per my EKS cluster version updates. For example, if I am using EKS Addons on my EKS v1.19.x and updated it to v1.20.x, then I am expecting my Addons also gets updated to the supported version of v1.20.x or the latest one. This will also hold for patch version updates for example from EKS v1.19.x to v1.19.y.
I am expecting some sort of feature flag in the EKS Addons section where users can opt-in for these updates automatically as and when they update their control plane version. This provides control on the user end whether they want to update these components automatically or they prefer the existing wat if doing it which is more manual.

Which service(s) is this request for?
EKS

Tell us about the problem you're trying to solve. What are you trying to do, and why is it hard?
Updating the Addons manually after EKS control plane updates becomes very hard and if you have multiple clusters to manage then it becomes impossible to make use of this feature. If I introduce the use of EKS Addons for my clusters then whenever I update my clusters version, I've to manually do the Addons updates which become overhead of multiple clusters.

Are you currently working around this issue?
I am not using EKS Addons as managing the manual updates of these components is not possible for multiple clusters.

Additional context
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[mikestef9]

This seems similar to #600. But sounds you like want automatic add-on updates in addition to updates as part of minor version upgrade. Curious, are you comfortable with add-on updates happening to your cluster by EKS without first testing in one of your lower environments?

[pramodpawade]

Hi @mikestef9, Yes but I am keener on providing this solution as some sort of flag to let users decide whether they want this functionality enabled or not. By doing this, users can test these addons updates on lower environments first automatically and then proceed for production environments.

[tgeoghegan]

One thing that is particularly painful here is the restriction that the VPC CNI plugin can only be updated one minor version at a time. So if I am updating my EKS cluster from Kubernetes 1.20 to 1.21, then I need to update from VPC CNI v1.7.5-eksbuild.2 to v1.10.1-eksbuild.1. Which in fact means I have to go 1.7.5 -> 1.8.x -> 1.9.y -> 1.10.1. There's no easy way I know of to automate that sequence of hops with a tool like Terraform and each update takes several minutes, making this quite a time consuming ops task since I have to do it across multiple developer environments, staging and finally production.