Kubernetes Support Radar: EKS, AKS, GKE & OpenShift EOL Costs

Know which Kubernetes clusters are running out of support, what you should upgrade to, and what it will cost if you don't. Covers Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE, Red Hat OpenShift, SUSE Rancher and upstream / on-prem Kubernetes (kubeadm, k3s, RKE2, Talos).

Managed Kubernetes versions get about 14 months of standard support. After that, the clouds either upgrade you automatically or charge for extended support, and that fee is easy to miss until the bill arrives:

Platform	Standard support	Extended support	Extra cost
Amazon EKS	$0.10 / cluster-hour	Starts automatically, up to 12 more months	$0.60 / cluster-hour, about +$365/month per cluster
Azure AKS	Standard tier $0.10 / cluster-hour	Long-Term Support needs the Premium tier	Premium $0.60 / cluster-hour, about +$365/month per cluster
Google GKE	$0.10 / cluster-hour	Extended release channel only, up to 24 months from release	+$0.50 / cluster-hour, about +$365/month per cluster (included in GKE Enterprise)

List prices as of October 2026. Check each provider's pricing page for your agreement.

What you get

Enter your clusters, for example:

prod: eks 1.33 x3
staging: aks 1.33
analytics: gke 1.34
onprem: k3s 1.31
openshift 4.20

and get, for each one:

• Status: standard, maintenance (OpenShift), extended, end_of_life
• Dates: when standard and extended support end, and days left
• Cost: the extra monthly and yearly cost of extended support for that many clusters
• Upgrade target: the newest version, and the oldest still-supported one
• A plain-English summary, for example:

  Amazon EKS 1.33 (3 clusters) is in extended support (about $1,095/month extra) until 2027-07-29 (285 days), then AWS upgrades it automatically. Upgrade to 1.37 (newest) or at least 1.34.

No clusters to enter? Leave the list empty to get every current version and its support dates for the platforms you choose.

Alerts

Run it on a weekly schedule and add a Slack webhook or webhook URL (Zapier, Make, n8n, Teams, PagerDuty, Jira automation). You're alerted when a cluster crosses one of your thresholds (default 90, 30 and 7 days before support ends) or moves into extended support or end of life, not on every run.

Who it's for

• Platform and SRE teams planning upgrades across many clusters and clouds
• FinOps teams finding surprise extended-support charges before they appear on the bill
• Security and compliance teams proving clusters run supported versions
• Consultants and MSPs reporting on client environments

Input tips

• Platform names: eks, aks, gke, kubernetes (or kubeadm, k3s, rke2, talos, on-prem), openshift, rancher.
• Versions like 1.31, v1.31.4 or 1.31.4-eks-123 all work; only the minor version matters.
• x N counts N clusters on the same version, so the cost estimate is right.

Output fields

cluster, platform, version, clusterCount, status, attention, summary, releaseDate, fullSupportEnds (OpenShift), standardSupportEnds, extendedSupportEnds, daysUntilStandardSupportEnds, daysUntilExtendedSupportEnds, extendedSupportExtraPerMonthUsd, extendedSupportExtraPerYearUsd, latestVersion, oldestSupportedVersion, minorVersionsBehind, latestPatch, note, checkedAt.

Pricing

$0.02 per cluster line checked (a line like prod: eks 1.33 x3 counts once). A weekly check of 10 lines costs under $1 a month.

Good to know

• Lifecycle dates come from endoflife.date, which tracks the providers' official calendars. Providers occasionally move dates; confirm before a major decision.
• AKS and GKE extended costs apply only if you opt in (Premium tier with LTS, or the GKE Extended channel). Otherwise those clusters are unsupported or upgraded automatically, which the summary explains.
• Opting out on EKS: extended support is on by default. Setting a cluster's upgrade policy to STANDARD avoids the fee; AWS then auto-upgrades the control plane at the end of standard support. EKS can roll back the control plane one minor version within 7 days of an in-place upgrade.
• Upgrade one minor version at a time. EKS and AKS don't skip minor versions, so going from 1.31 to 1.34 means three upgrades.
• Self-managed distributions (k3s, RKE2, kubeadm, Talos) follow upstream Kubernetes versions; your vendor may offer longer support.

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