Seven changes that break Amazon EKS clusters going from 1.36 to 1.37, with a test command for each.

By Evgeny Anikiev, AWS-certified DevOps engineer with 10+ years running build automation, CI/CD, and Kubernetes in production. Last verified: October 22, 2026, against the Amazon EKS 1.37 documentation.

TL;DR: Amazon EKS has supported Kubernetes 1.37 since October 2, 2026. Most of the release is additive, but seven changes can break running workloads. Test each one with the command in its section, rehearse on a staging cluster, then upgrade the control plane, add-ons, and nodes in that order.

The seven changes:

SELinux mount labeling is on by default.

Static pods can no longer reference Secrets or ConfigMaps.

The kubelet refuses to start with deprecated cAdvisor flags.

eventRecordQPS: 0 now means "no limit".

EKS Auto Mode defaults new NodePools to Balanced consolidation.

HPA scale-to-zero is enabled by default.

kube-proxy IPVS mode is deprecated.

What is new in Kubernetes 1.37 on EKS?

Kubernetes…