EKS Running Out of IP Addresses - Why Ten Nodes Empty a /23, How to Count What the VPC CNI Really Takes, and the Four Fixes in Order (Warm Pool, Secondary CIDR with Custom Networking, Prefix Delegatio

· Rahul Wagh · Oct. 19, 2026, 1:30 a.m.
Summary
The blog post discusses the issue of Amazon EKS running out of IP addresses, explaining the reasons behind pods getting stuck in "ContainerCreating" and node group failures. It provides an analysis of how the Amazon VPC CNI consumes IP addresses based on the number of pods and Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) used, offering a mathematical breakdown for calculating address needs per node and detailing strategies to resolve these issues in order, including shrinking the warm pool and sizing clusters appropriately.
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