
Upgrading Kubernetes clusters in production environments can be a daunting task—especially when aiming for zero downtime. With the release of Kubernetes 1.32 and the evolution of Karpenter, AWS users face both powerful improvements and critical changes that must be handled with precision. In this guide, we walk you through a real-world upgrade path for AWS EKS, covering everything from node group strategy and ArgoCD handling to Karpenter v1 migration and persistent volume configuration.
Whether you're an SRE, DevOps engineer, or platform owner, this step-by-step approach will help you upgrade your EKS cluster from v1.30 to v1.32 while preserving workload availability, managing risks, and preparing for the latest Kubernetes features.