[EKS] [request]: EKS Alpha Clusters

[sidewinder12s]

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Tell us about your request

Support Alpha clusters similar to GKE

Which service(s) is this request for?
EKS

Tell us about the problem you're trying to solve. What are you trying to do, and why is it hard?

Many users want to enable alpha level feature gates on the control plane. Allowing Alpha clusters where AWS simply enables every feature gate would allow testing/development in a managed kubernetes provider of alpha features before they hit Beta/GA.

Many users have requested that EKS support expose feature gates that users can enable, but this comes with stability concerns. This might be a decent tradeoff.

#512
#2314
#978

I also assume this would be useful internally for the EKS Team while validating/testing new Kubernetes versions.

Are you currently working around this issue?

Users would need to run their own control plane or use GKE.

Additional context

GKE has supported this for a while.