AWS Billed $1,665 Extra Monthly After Kubernetes and MySQL Versions Aged Out of Support
A cloud infrastructure review triggered by unexpected AWS cost anomalies revealed that an EKS cluster and an RDS MySQL instance had quietly entered extended support billing, adding over $1,600 per month in new charges. The EKS control plane version had reached end-of-standard-support, causing the hourly rate to jump sixfold from $0.10 to $0.60, while RDS MySQL 8.0 triggered a separate extended-support fee on the same calendar-based logic. Although the control plane had been upgraded regularly through 2023–2026, critical cluster add-ons such as kube-proxy, CoreDNS, and vpc-cni had never been updated and were running versions several years behind. The investigation also exposed deeper infrastructure issues including misconfigured disruption budgets, node groups unable to safely roll, and hidden blockers preventing RDS Blue/Green deployments. The incident highlighted a key operational risk: AWS does not automatically upgrade self-managed add-ons, meaning teams can unknowingly accumulate dangerous version drift while systems appear healthy.
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